Community Engagement Goals for TerraFund projects

TerraFund encourages engaging local communities throughout your project. This article defines a “beneficiary”; please review it carefully and ensure both direct and indirect beneficiaries are recorded accurately.

Livelihoods Benefitted 

In this section, you will provide details on your project’s approach to engaging local communities, the number of people that your project aims to directly or indirectly benefit and the livelihood initiatives your project plans to implement.

Unlike employees and volunteers, beneficiaries do not do any paid work on the project but are people within the local community that you support during project implementation. Local community members receiving benefits or supported may include: 

• A person employed through a partner or subcontracted organization 
• A service provider that is not an employee of the organization, like a broker, contractor, supplier of goods and services
• People offering services to the organization such as catering services, and transport services are not considered a job but rather a beneficiary.

The main difference between beneficiaries and volunteers is that beneficiaries do not work directly for the project, whereas volunteers do work directly for the project. For example, if someone plants trees for your project and receives a benefit such as transportation reimbursement (but no pay), this is a volunteer. If someone receives seedlings to plant on their own farm to benefit their own livelihood, this is a beneficiary. 

For the livelihood initiatives, you can select one or multiple options from the provided list:

• Establishment of oil processing center such as palm oil, avocado 
• Supporting farmers with small animals such as poultry and rabbit farming 
• Promoting soil and Water conservation practices 
• Establishing Home Gardens 
• Establishing market linkages 
• Promoting Energy saving cookstoves such as use of briquettes 
• Promotion non-tree fruit and Vegetables farming 
• Supporting Climate Smart Agriculture and farmer field schools 
• Promoting of Cover crops, fodder crops or intercropping 
• Trainings to smallholder farmers on restoration 
• Establishing Village savings and Loans associations or local cooperatives 
• Bee Keeping/Apiary management 
• Distribution of trees or seedlings for agroforestry, woodlots, or enrichment planting 
• Others