Mohamad Tahar Jumat: leveraging sustainable tourism
How did IUVA start?
After working for Mercy Relief for a couple of years I decided that I had the network and experience with different communities to start my own venture. I started to organize small overseas community engagement programs for schools, partnering with local organizations. But I realized that some of those organizations wouldn’t compensate local community members enough, like hiring ten workers to manage over five hundred hectares of land while not paying them a fair wage. I was very agitated and tried to talk to management to get that changed but they wouldn’t budge so I decided to start my own programs and officially listed IUVA as a sole proprietorship in 2012 and as an incorporated company in 2015. IUVA operates in a pretty niche market: engaging with local community members, consulting with school leaders, designing programs, and facilitating programs. I see it as an enterprise that creates a win-win situation for all and having a sustainable impact. Sustainable because of how it generate income for local communities while addressing sustainability issues and empowering local stakeholders. In our project in Lombok it’s not about giving money to members of the community to plant mangroves, but showing them the logic behind why things are done or should be done in a particular way. It increases the income of locals while changing their mindset about sustainability, sanitation, and waste management.
How do you balance the expectations between the Singaporean groups attending the program and local stakeholders?
There will always be negative impacts that have to be mitigated. For example when I brought students from an all girls school, who have not interacted with a lot of youth their age outside of their school, they got infatuated with local boys and how rugged they are. We still want them to interact but I tell the boys, that are mostly young and unmarried, that they have to think about their ultimate goals and village to put aside their feelings. For the girls I talk to their teachers about how to advise them and manage these social expectations.
Another example is about local traditions. When I go to a village I will ask them to have a showcase of local customs at a farewell party for each group, but most don’t have those anymore. One time, a village started dancing Western and Bollywood dances because they didn’t know anything about local customs. I told them that they should learn about these customs so that the group could see them, which I think made the locals feel like they have to retain their cultural heritage and be more active in preserving their culture. Even in the reforestation projects that we do, the locals might be so used to just cutting trees and not replacing it. But with the nursery projects it’s about changing their mindsets around their relationship to the forest, to make them realize the benefits of reforestation through education and pressure from foreign groups coming into their village — so that they don’t continue to ignore the environmental issues in their community.
What’s the process of going to the community and forming those relationships
A lot of people think about building those relationships by cutting corners but that’s the opposite of what should be done. It takes time, for example in Sumatra we were in conversation with local villagers since 2012 but didn’t start the reforestation program until 2015 because we were waiting to get more buy-in from the community. It’s a similar story for Lombok, we started forming partnerships around 2013 but didn’t start programs until 2015. I also don’t work with government agencies, only directly with the community. That has been my way from the start, if community members want to or need to work with the government i just leave it to them.
You also have to continuously demonstrate the value of the work that you’re doing. Villagers were always saying that there was no money in planting fruit trees, but in five to six years when the trees are matured a family can upgrade their way of life by selling the fruit. These are the things we want them to see for themselves, we cannot just tell them to do things differently. Now when there is an orangutan in their fruit trees farmers are less likely to kill or injure it because they know that even though the orangutan will eat the fruits in the trees there will still be enough fruit for them to make a profit and use that money to send their kid to school.
How do you measure impact or progress?
You can see this in Sumatra where the reforestation site has increased from a hundred meter plot to over thirty-two hectares. A lot more farmlands want to join us but we’re focusing on quality over quantity, if the site is too big we cannot effectively allocate resources. We want to see progress but it will only be evident in six years time, the trees planted in those areas are planted in the shade (under the canopy) so they will not grow so fast. It will be a while until the trees have fully matured but it’s okay for us to wait. At the end of the day it’s about the change of mindset in the community members that live at the fringe of the forest. Like how farmers don’t perceive orangutans as pests and the instances of animal-human conflict in the area has been reduced.
What sort of legacy do you hope to leave through the work that you do?
I hope that we can do our small part to make the world a better place for others. Most of the destruction done to the rainforests in Sumatra or mangrove areas in Lombok are done by people that are intelligent and understand the impact of their actions. I want to empower these communities so that they can take action to mitigate those impact, to create a reciprocal relationship between people and nature.
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Mohamad Tahar Jumat is the founder of IUVA Global and is based in Singapore and Indonesia.
Iuva in latin means to help. IUVA Global designs and implements community projects around sustainability for Singaporean schools in Indonesia. Connect and learn more about their programs here.
