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Gart van Leersum

Secretary

At the end of 2024, Gart van Leersum will succeed Tieme Wanders. Gart retired in 2024 and has devoted virtually his entire career to development cooperation. After his studies at Wageningen University, his work took him to Lesotho, Colombia, Honduras, Cameroon, Chile and Benin with the FAO, CARE, Wageningen University and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Over the past 13 years, he has worked from CARE Netherlands in fifteen countries on three continents on themes such as disaster prevention, humanitarian aid, community development, environmental rehabilitation and climate change adaptation with a focus on gender equality. 

Pepijn Koops

Chairman

My name is Pepijn Koops, born in Haarlem on December 29, 1970. I studied forestry in Wageningen but completed my studies at Hogeschool Larenstein in early 1996. During my studies I did two internships in Cameroon at the Tropenbos foundation and at timber company Wijma. After that I went to work in Cameroon to set up a new reforestation project in collaboration with the Sultan of Foumban. I had been planting trees since I was a child, so that was right up my alley!

Even after I had started working elsewhere, I still came close to the project with some regularity, because I had started a family with my Cameroonian wife. I saw how after a few years the trees were left to their fate due to financial mismanagement. I tried to have the firebreaks maintained a few times. It was not until 2020 that I “picked up the gauntlet” and decided to try to breathe new life into the project. I contacted the people from the village of Maloure whom I knew from before – they had created CODEMA in the meantime: an organisation for the development of their village. CODEMA responded enthusiastically to the idea of ​​giving the project a new start.

Since 2023, I have founded the Dutch Foundation Plantations Forestières du Noun together with Tieme and Ibrahim. I knew Tieme from my Wageningen studies and my internship at Tropenbos, and Ibrahim is the son of another Dutch/Cameroonian couple who we had regularly visited in Foumban. Through the foundation, I hope to be able to support CODEMA more professionally with the management of the reforestation project at the time, but the foundation also wants to offer other villages the opportunity to realize such a project. The foundation focuses on villages in the Cameroonian Noun department because of the good contacts we still have with the Sultan of that region.

Tieme Wanders

Co-founder (former Treasurer)

Tieme studied tropical forestry in Wageningen. He worked for 24 years in tropical forestry as a consultant, mainly on projects in Africa. Tieme has gained a lot of experience in the sustainable management of both planted and natural forests and has contributed to the certification of large areas of forest. He has been closely involved in plantation construction in Cameroon, Ghana and Tanzania.
From 1999 to the end of 2002 he was involved in the reforestation project RECOFON in Maloure in Cameroon. The RECOFON project is special because many tree species from the region were tested to see if they could be cultivated. Some of these proved to be very successful. 25 years later, the areas that were planted with those species can still be clearly seen on Google Earth. Although he has kept in touch with several of his former colleagues from Cameroon, it was not really possible to do anything to preserve the forest. With the PFN foundation it is possible to support forests like the one in Maloure with advice and assistance.

Ibrahim Louh

Treasurer

Ibrahim is an environmental consultant with an MSc degree in Environmental and Natural Sciences from Radboud University in Nijmegen.

Ibrahim was born in Créteil (France) on November 26, 1981 and raised in Cameroon where he grew up until he was twenty. Ibrahim's passion for forestry started at a young age, after which he did various internships at sawmills in Cameroon at the age of 15. Confronted with the intensive logging of Cameroonian forests - especially in the region where he grew up - he decided to study forest and nature management. He moved to the Netherlands and in 2001 he started the Forest and Nature Management course at the Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences in Velp. In 2005 he returned to Cameroon for his final thesis. He wrote a management plan for the reforestation project in Maloure, Cameroon. After his HBO education, Ibrahim decided to broaden his passion for nature and followed the study Environment and Natural Sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen.

After obtaining his MSc degree, Ibrahim started his career as an environmental consultant at various consultancy companies within the energy sector, as there was still a lot to be gained in terms of sustainability. In 2021, he switched to the renewable energy sector, with which he contributes to the energy transition in the North Sea. In addition to his current position, he has taken the step together with Pepijn Koops to set up the Plantations Forestières du Noun foundation. In this way, he follows his passion for forest and nature management and contributes to the fight against climate change.