Community Forestry, Well‐being and National Poverty Benchmark: Existing status and achievements

Community forestry (CF) is expected to reduce poverty, particularly in remote areas of Nepal, where the population below standard poverty line is extremely high and the forest condition degraded. Although community forestry has been widely appreciated as a successful programme in terms of rehabilitating forest condition, the state of institutional and social inclusion and livelihoods opportunity is discouraging and has not been recognized at national level in line with the other achievements made so far. Likewise, feeding the contribution made in the livelihoods opportunity into the national poverty goal has been a great challenge. Consequently, the donors are implementing different projects, they feels a challenge to aggregate the achievements due to the different methodology used in order to achieve the same objective. This paper explores the existing situation of relative poverty and a way to feed the CF achievements into the national poverty reduction goal. This paper demonstrates the importance of a standard absolute relative line to quantify the socio‐economic changes. The findings are based on the 2700 households of the sampled 26 CFUGs. The result shows very encouraging status in regards to change in livelihoods condition of poor whereas more than 45% poor users have crossed the relative poverty line due to the membership of community forest. It is hoped that this paper will facilitate policy maker to initiate to shape the poverty reduction strategy achievements into the national poverty reduction goal and rethink on the relative and absolute poverty benchmark.