Author: Emy Maro (Secretary and Coordinator of FoRLa Information Center)

The annual membership meeting of the Alor Seaweed Forum (FoRLa-Alor) community group on June 11, 2015, provided several recommendations that needed to be followed up, one of which was the Seaweed Savings Account (TRL). For this reason, the board - assisted by WWF-Indonesia - tried to build a system that could manage the TRL action plan. The system for running TRL was socialized to FoRLa members in seven villages in 2015. The seven villages are Pante Deere Village, Aalang Village, Aimoli Village, Bana Village, Kayang Village, West Kalondama Village, and Wailawar Village.

Socialization activities will continue by reminding cultivator members to deposit savings of 10 kg of seaweed (plus 1 kg for anticipated shrinkage) per year with the village motivator. After that, the village motivator will check, record and send the savings to FoRLa-Alor. Then, FoRLa-Alor will double-check the seaweed savings and sell them to UD Hasil Laut. The rupiah earned from the sale will be kept in each member's savings book, according to the capacity of the TRL pool and the price set at that time from UD Hasil Laut. Furthermore, FoRLa-Alor will return the savings value, which includes the real number of kilograms of seaweed and the rupiah from the scales, back to the saving member. All the results are legally the right of the owner of the savings book and the results can be taken after the second year. As much as 20% of the initial savings will go to FoRLa-Alor's treasury, which is used for operational costs (such as office costs, including the wages of administrators and motivators) and group mentoring costs.

Different villages have different acceptance of TRL socialization from members and village officials. Some village officials were quite cooperative, while others were not supportive, even though the farmers in the village were very eager to participate in TRL. But in general, the socialization of the TRL system, which was conducted in October-December 2015, was well received. Even the head of Kayang Village said that TRL could help and assist in reducing the consumptive culture of cultivators. Not only that, the participants of the socialization activities in West Kalondama Village were very active and made the discussion very interesting. The cultivators were also very interested in the idea and decided to accept FoRLa-Alor, even to become members. Efforts to collect savings have also begun since December 2015 until March 2016, with an agreement that the time to collect savings varies depending on the agreement of each village. In addition to conducting TRL socialization, FoRLa-Alor also socialized the Better Management Practice (BMP) guidelines for seaweed cultivation, as well as updating member data by distributing registration forms for new members.

This system is not yet standardized, not even perfect because it still needs to be tested and a lot of improvement. However, FoRLa-Alor will still try to run this system while slowly being refined to improve the lives of cultivators as well as FoRLa institutions in the future.