“ROLE OF WOMEN IN COMMUNITY AND PRIVATE FOREST MANAGEMENT
OF DHANUSHA DISTRICT, NEPAL”
Runa Kharel
Coordinator, Human Resource and Gender
Friends of Nature
This study examines the roles of women in forest management in East Nepal. The purpose of this study were to acknowledge the importance of women’s importance, identify their present status and the challenges to their full participation and suggest strategies to enhance women’s participation with respect to community and private forestry.
This research is mainly focused on two community forestry of Bengadabar VDC at Dhanusha district. These two community forest has been purposively chosen to describe the activities, tasks and participation of women in forestry, rules and regulations and the factors involved in their participation. Qualitative research methods were chosen to study this research. These methods include a review of literature, discussion with the experts and other related personalities. Data for the research studies were collected by using semi-structure interviews, which were carried out in July 2004 in Dhanusha District of Nepal.
The study sought to verify certain proposition showing the relationship between factors affecting women’s participation in community forestry conservation and management programs and actual participation of FUG in program activities. The findings of the studies confirmed these propositions and derived some new ones for verification in future studies. The women’s FUGs were found to be highly participative in completing all their tasks successfully. Thus, it can be concluded that women’s involvement in FUGs can definitely help to solve the problem of deforestation and provides some guidelines in organizing women’s FUGs, and in so doing raises the women’s chance to implement forest related activities successfully.