Climate change adoption for 100 farmers in Uganda

We planted 865 bamboo seedlings in April 2022 and they are growing steadily. We are happy to report that ALL of the seedlings planted are still alive! We are excited about the future opportunities that will be created by this initiative - thank you once again for your generous support!

Being a treeline and fast-growing grass, bamboo offers many opportunities for value addition for our smallholder farmers. Bamboo also offers environmental benefits including removing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which would contribute to mitigating climate change. Additionally, our bamboo will also be used as a substitute for cooking, therefore reducing deforestation - which is dangerously high in our area of operation. We carefully selected the Bambusa Vulgaris species, which is versatile and can thrive on slopes and degraded soils - a common phenomenon among our smallholder farming communities.

By 2025, we will have set up a moderate community-based production facility. It will be used to train smallholder farmers in making items like crafts, furniture, and ornaments in order to diversify their incomes, as well as for use in construction as a substitute for trees. Moreover, factory residues will be used for soil amendment as biochar, along with other simple agricultural interventions.

Biochar: The rains have unpredictably been longer than expected, but we hope to carbonize lots of agricultural waste from farmers’ gardens at the start of the new year.

DID YOU KNOW: one planted bamboo plant can sequester 2 tons of carbon dioxide in just 7 years? In comparison, a typical hardwood tree will sequester 1 ton of carbon dioxide in 40 years.