Friends of Usambara Society

About us

Friends of Usambara Society (FoU) is an exceptionally prolific grassroots non-profit organisation based in Lushoto that uses sustainable tourism to preserve culture and conserve nature of Usambara mountains region. FoU is widely known for its popular Cultural Tourism Program, which apparently attracts hundreds of tourists annually and serves as an appendage for generating resources needed for sustaining FoU’s core organizational activities/ community based projects i.e. biodiversity conservation, livelihoods development projects as well as direct contribution to specific village development priorities (within the catchment area) in the form of village development fund (VDF) where by 20 percent of the business revenue are used to support community relating projects.
Programmatically, FoU is directly involved in community-based environmental awareness creation and education campaign, large-scale tree planting and agroforestry, protection and regeneration of forests, as well as combating desertification and promotion of sustainable forestry in an effort to slow global climate change. Using its multi-dimensional model, FoU’s sustainable approach to community forestry simultaneously addresses poverty as well as environmental problems