Tackling the Root Causes of Rainforest Loss

The Full Story

Farming a Way Out of Poverty

Across Indonesia, farmers living on the forest edge face a difficult reality. Generations of chemical-dependent farming have left much of the region’s soil depleted, and as yields fall, families are pushed toward whatever pays fastest, often illegal, small-scale gold mining. Mining brings quick cash but leaves poisoned water, barren land, and stripped forest in its wake, destroying the very farmland communities depend on and deepening the poverty that drove them to mine in the first place. Weak land rights and patchy law enforcement make this cycle hard to break without a genuine alternative.

YIARI works with many of these communities to interrupt that cycle at its root, teaching organic farming and agroforestry techniques that restore soil health without expensive chemical inputs, and turning unproductive, fire-prone land into thriving rice, sugar cane, coffee and vegetable farms.

Empowering Women to Protect Forests

Many of YIARI’s forest restoration projects are led by women. At tree nurseries, women grow seedlings from forest-collected seeds in biodegradable pots woven from pandanus leaves rather than plastic, and are paid directly for both the work and the pots they weave, giving many of them an income of their own for the first time. 

The Power of Mama takes this further: a 96-strong, all-female firefighting team, the first of its kind in Indonesia, now protects the forest from one of its biggest threats and gives local women a leading role in conservation.

Building a Future for the Next Generation

YIARI’s scholarship programme provides bikes and boarding costs so that young people in remote areas can attend high school. So far, 11 young people have already graduated and gone on to train as doctors, midwives and teachers.

In villages where children are out of school altogether, YIARI has set up libraries, donated laptops, and run literacy programmes, including for women who missed out on an education themselves. At the Sir Michael Uren Learning Centre in Ketapang, education, research and community life come together under one roof.

Impact So Far

This work had improved the lives of over 3,000 women, men, and children across Indonesia. But the goal isn’t simply to reduce poverty, it’s to break the link between poverty and the destruction of the rainforest for good, one village, one family, and one alternative livelihood at a time.