Community capacity for social enterprise development: Empirical evidence from community forest enterprises (CFEs) in Cameroon
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Community forest enterprises (CFEs) are emerging as sustainable options for local development, these enterprises trade to meet their social and environmental goals, thus characterizing them as social enterprises. However, knowledge of the capacity of these communities to develop and effectively manage CFEs is not well known. With inspiration from the organizational capacity theory, the asset-based community development (ABCD) theory, a framework for community capacity is developed. Based on data from a sample of 31 communities, principal component analysis, descriptive statistics, and the Pearson correlation test was used to evaluate community capacity and the relationship between dimensions of community capacity. The findings reveal that natural resource availability received the highest score (4.08), thus underlying the fact that these communities are endowed with natural resources that can propel their growth if managed sustainably. However, other dimensions of community capacity are poor, community capacity for partnerships and social networking was the lowest (1.33), followed by infrastructure (1.38), skills and knowledge of members (1.58) was equally very low with significant poor knowledge in enterprise development, marketing, and financial management. The overall sense of community was poor averaging 2.84 on a scale of 5, community capacity for financial management was equally not very good (3.94). Although participation was not very poor in most cases, women, youths, and minority groups need to be empowered further to participate actively in community activities. Correlation analysis reveals that some of these domains are highly correlated, thus when one is triggered, there is a positive spill-over effect on other dimensions. Financial management capacity, participation, leadership, and resource mobilization emerge as key dimensions that when triggered can have significant positive effects on other domains of community capacity.
Keywords: Sustainable forest management, Governance, Education, Decent employment, Economic Development
ID: 3486804