WESTERN BUREAU – The Dolphin Head Trust (DHT) in Hanover is to begin work on its Bamboo Conversion Utilisation Project this month.

The project is aimed at training Hanover’s young people – aged 18 to 25 – in using bamboo to make furniture. The long-term goal is to provide the parish’s youth with a skill as well as a source of employment that will serve, on a wider scale, to enhance the parish’s economy.

“We are utilising bamboo, which is found (in) every square inch of the hillside of Lucea and we have a lot of unemployed youth in the area,” DHT head, Paula Hurlock said. “So what we are trying to do is to put the two together. We are trying to utilise bamboo to create alternative livelihoods for these young people.”

The Trust also hopes that the project will become a viable alternative to the degradation of the Dolphin Head Mountains, where locals are reportedly engaged in practising certain destructive practices.

“In the past, most of the NGOs (non-governmental organisations) tried to protect the area through enforcement… but it hasn’t worked. When you tell people to stop doing something, they just get vex. So we are trying to take a passive approach to conservation. And this innovative approach involves the creation of alternative livelihood options for the local stakeholders,” the DHT head said.

Funding for the project was provided through a US$79,000 (J$3.98-million) grant from the Japanese Embassy last month. The grant was provided under the Japanese Grant Assistance for Grassroots Projects.

But Japan’s involvement in the project does not end there. According to Hurlock, a bamboo expert from Japan is to provide training and the benefits will be far-reaching.

“We are supposed to be getting a bamboo trainer/expert from Japan and that person will come in and work with a local counterpart because we want the technical transfer to be solid,” Hurlock said. “We want to ensure that when these guys come in and train the locals, that the whole process is documented and procedures put in place so that our NGO will be able to share that technical information with other organisations around the island.”

Phase one of the project will see the construction of the facility to house the operation of the project in the Askenish/Clifton area of the parish in addition to the purchasing of the necessary equipment.

“It is going to be just a structure that will facilitate training. It’s going to be a large open space structure because we are going to be focusing on bamboo outdoor furniture,” Hurlock said. “We are down here in western Jamaica and we know the hotels may be interested in bamboo gazebos, outdoor bars, outdoor garden chairs and ordinary garden structures like trellises.”

Added the DHT head: “Basically we don’t need a lot of tools to do this. It is labour intensive. So we are going to be utilising whatever techniques the Japanese have in terms of crafting bamboo.”

The training, Hurlock said, will begin about September and the expectation is that some 50 persons would have been trained at the end of the first year of the project.

The areas in which they will be trained include:

. harvesting and curing bamboo;

. preparing bamboo for production; and

. crafting the bamboo into the desired product(s).

“The first thing we are going to be doing after we have trained people… is to develop a set of prototypes to see how they work and how people like them. And then we develop an operation procedure for developing that line of product. We don’t want to set up an inefficiently operated facility,” said an optimistic Hurlock.

In the interim the Trust will undertake the construction of a two-mile hiking trail through the Dolphin Head Mountains, which it was established to protect in 1993.

“And we are definitely utilising a bamboo theme along that trail,” Hurlock said. “We are going to be utilising bamboo to create structural details like trellises, arches, handrails and mini-bridges.”