As for most countries in Central Africa, many people in Cameroon depend on forests for a living. But while the sector has strong potential to transform the lives of millions of forest-dependent communities, access to finance is a major challenge – especially for community forest enterprises (CFEs).

The FCDO-funded DRYAD project, a five-year initiative led by CIFOR-ICRAF, took an innovative approach to bridging the finance gap for CFEs. DRYAD was an experiment in deploying public finance to de-risk and prepare community forest enterprises for private investment through a performance-based finance approach. Although DRYAD did not make investments like a bank or private asset manager, it still sought a ‘return’ on its commitment of public capital – measured by the fulfilment of important social, commercial and environmental objectives rather than solely money.

Through a combination of innovative financing, technical support and monitoring, DRYAD supported nine types of enterprises — from cassava to timber to rattan fish — for 34 CFEs. By the close of the project in June 2020, 29 of the 34 were in operation, recording a failure rate of less than 6%, compared to the average national failure rate of 90% in the first year.

“DRYAD has demonstrated the potential of CFEs to contribute to Cameroon’s economic, social and environmental development, and has provided important lessons on ways of financing and supporting CFEs to generate benefits,” said Peter Minang, Principal Investigator for the project.

A special edition of Ecology and Society drew on lessons from DRYAD in its review of 20 years of community forestry in Cameroon.