LONDON, UK: Inqo Investments Limited (INQO) introduced a collaboration with Belmont University, Nashville on its Conservation and Rural Enterprises (CARE) Project with the aim of utilizing enterprise to tackle environmental and social points across the Budongo Forest in Uganda.
Through a $4 million US dollar grant, the CARE project will make investments in small and medium size enterprises (SME) in and round Budongo Forest over the subsequent three years.
The 825 km2 Budongo Forest is home to greater than 600 chimpanzees, classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), in addition to a variety of different flora and fauna.
The forest is a half of the Murchison Falls National Park Conservation Area which is the largest protected space in Uganda covering 3,840 km2 and a key space for the country’s biodiversity conservation.
Budongo Forest faces a number of threats together with unlawful bush meat poaching, deforestation for charcoal manufacturing and increasing inhabitants pressure across the forest fringes. The CARE project is designed across the perception that social and environmental points are interrelated and that poverty is the main trigger of deforestation on this region.
By working with communities in and across the Budongo Forest to construct scalable and sustainable SMEs, the CARE project goals to create jobs and increase livelihood within the community and to present alternative employment to actions such as bushmeat poaching and charcoal production. Examples of enterprises currently being explored include an eco-lodge, sustainable agriculture, agri-processing and photo voltaic induction cook range meeting plant.
The project will be managed by Inqo Investments Ltd., one of many pioneers within the socio-environmental impact funding space having based the Kuzuko Private Game Reserve in South Africa with the expressed aim of making jobs in an space of over 70% unemployment.
INQO is a South Africa-based social impact firm listed on the London Aquis Stock Exchange Growth Market. It makes strategic acquisitions and investments in companies designed to tackle poverty and supply employment, merchandise and services to the poor in Low Income Countries (LICs).