Reforest native trees, empower women healers

We’re excited to report that in 2021 we successfully said farewell to our Native Seeds Project in Gulu, Uganda. As a small non-profit, WildFF focuses on projects where we feel we can make a long-lasting impact. This entails creating an exit strategy, generally after 3-5 years, which entails integrating education and training with the local communities we partner with.

In 2015, WildFF started collaborating with the Wise Women Uganda (Mon Ma Ryek), a communitybased organization of women healers, to conserve and restore the forests of northern Uganda. We are proud that our work helped this community find new opportunities close to their heart after decades of civil war–and widespread forest loss:
— 130,000 native trees of 20 local varieties planted

— Provided the tools and training the community needs to implement landscape-scale restoration

— Funded literacy classes for the Wise Women and financially supported a VSLA, a community savings and microloans program

— Partnered with 130+ farmers to plant trees on their land

— Conducted numerous climate resilience workshops in each of the 10 communities

The program is now well-established with paid staff. It includes a seven-acre nursery and agroforest demonstration site, including two native tree nurseries, and hosts year-round programs that bring education, income-generating activities, and tree planting activities to 30 villages in the Gulu District.

Hi friends,

As always, greetings from Northern Uganda, where smiles abound and folks are hard at work. We’re excited to share some big news here in Palorinya Refugee Settlement, home to 120,000 South Sudanese refugees!

In our last report, we mentioned that we secured a partnership with One Tree Planted to scale our impact significantly. Well, we’re happy to report that our programs with that partnership are off to a great start.

Since 2018, we’ve been working in Palorinya, testing different systems and getting much needed tree seedlings into the hands of refugees, to stabilize climate patterns and bring back tree cover. Why trees you may ask? Trees create micro-climates that create the perfect conditions for greater food security, via greater harvest yields provided by increased soil fertility and rain stabilization.

This is important in areas like northern Uganda, who have experienced severe deforestation in recent decades and have put the ecosystem at risk for desertification. Since 2018, we’ve planted over 200,000 trees, directly with the refugees that live in the area. Now, with One Tree Planted, we’re going to plant the same amount of trees in a single year. Yup, you heard that right: we’re planting over 200,000 trees in the next 12 months.

The past few months, our team on the ground has mobilized 150 community members to prep degraded landscapes. These landscapes, former sites of clear-cutting, are being transformed into agricultural fields for food production and sites of massive reforestation activities. This means that barren fields that currently look like deserts will soon be once again lush, life-giving fields of biodiversity and food production.

Our community members are receiving much-needed tree seedling care and maintenance training, as well as training on agroforestry and agroecological farming techniques. These trainings will allow farmers to increase the productivity of these once-barren fields by up to 400%.

By working with nature, we can create fields of abundance: both for the integrity of the ecosystem as well as the humans that inhabit it. Through this program, we will get refugee families off of food rations from the UN, by growing acres of much-needed crops, that will feed families and create food surplus in local markets. At the very same time, tree cover will once again return to this isolated area, transforming the landscape to one that is no longer afflicted by climate variabilities and volatility.

Join us. Give today. Let’s do right by people and planet, all in one fell swoop.

Greetings from Northern Uganda, where the seasons are changing from harvest-time to dry season. During the coming months, the people of Northern Uganda will be taking a break from their farmlands, as harvest time is coming to a close. 

 But this doesn’t mean it's time to be idle. Our team in Northern Uganda are still following up with farmers to make sure the trees we’ve planted are growing well. Meetings with communities are going on, to discuss how farmers have seen their farmlands more abundant by the trees we’ve planted with them, what we could do differently, and what our plan for the following year is. 

 Our team is hard at work prepping a work plan for the coming year. We’ve been discussing a lot of new ideas that we’re excited about. We’ve been planting trees with about 1,000 farmers for the past four years; trees that mimic the forests that used to be, trees that restore the soil and make farmlands more productive, trees that provide natural medicine for communities, and trees that provide fruit and other useful nutrients to keep people healthy. Trees, we’ve learned, are integral to not just a healthy landscape, but a healthy community. 

Now, we’re looking forward to ensure that the trees we’ve planted survive well into the future. Our colleague has been working to develop an app for a smart phone that will allow farmers to upload photos of their trees, and from there, provide direct metrics in real time to monitor the trees’ growth. This ‘tree tool’ will allow us to have total transparency in allowing us to see our impact. We know that getting trees into the ground is one thing, but ensuring they grow into mature, healthy trees is another. 

Keep on the lookout next year for photos of the trees we’ve planted with farmers. Together, with your help, we can ensure that we keep these trees alive, keep soils happy and healthy for the communities that depend on them, and do our part to combat climate change on large scale.

From Northern Uganda to you,

The Native Seeds Project team

Our world seems unhinged these days. The problems that plague our societies are on spotlight, as borders and businesses and ‘normal life’ continue to close down from a pandemic that swept the world away overnight. We’re all pivoting to find a new normal, whether it be our daily routines, our work life, with our family and how we stay connected to friends. 

This pandemic has, in some way, brought us together as a global community. Whether in a bustling city in the US or a village in northern Uganda, we’re all facing a similar reality: how do we keep our families safe and our children fed? How do we protect our grandmothers from a virus that may disproportionately affect them? 

But even in a drastically changed world, the work continues. We’ve been asked to look at what is essential. The Native Seeds Project has always believed that our work is essential. We’ve always looked to the future: how will we ensure the longevity of soil fertility to make sure communities can continue to grow their own food, and have abundant harvests? How do we bring back tree cover to ensure microclimates that boost crop productivity and ensure long-term, sustainable food security amidst growing climate change concerns? 

We’re happy to say that even in the midst of a global pandemic, our resolve in the importance of our work remains unchanged. We are essential. Our work is essential. As people lose jobs and the economic fallout of the pandemic becomes more certain the world over, our commitment to food security and restored forests with ample biodiversity has never seemed more important. 

So, even in a drastically changed world, the work continues. Uganda has enforced a very strict lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus, namely because the government understood that their healthcare system does not have the capacity to deal with a pandemic. That lockdown meant the temporary halting of our activities, but as the lockdown eases up, our colleagues are slowly getting back to work. 

We work closely with 1,000 farmers to restore tree cover and to diversify farming systems, all to make their croplands more resilient and more abundant. We established the first native tree nursery in the region, and continue to be a beacon of native tree restoration in the region. When we first started our work, people raised their eyebrows at us: why native tree species? What do they do? Five years later, we have organizations and even local government departments coming to us for recommendations on their own native tree restoration and agroforestry projects. Why? Because native tree cover is essential to healthy ecosystems. And healthy ecosystems are essential to food security. And food security is essential to the livelihood and the health of local communities. For today’s generation and tomorrow’s. 

We know there’s a lot of problems in the world right now. It can be hard to sift through which ones most need our support. Sometimes all we can do is put a bandaid on a problem rather than finding the surgeon that can remediate the root issue. We want to let you know that in this metaphor, our project is a well-trained surgeon. We don’t put bandaids on the problem of food insecurity by running food banks or handing out GMO seeds. We look at the entire system–for us, the ecosystem–to see how we can address the root cause of ecosystem loss and inconsistent rain fall–and do the surgery necessary to restore the land back to its optimal functioning. For the human communities that live on it, and the biological communities that comprise it. 

This is how we change the world for the better. We hope you’ll continue to support our work, as we continue to plant trees to restore forests and to restore communities’ holistic livelihood. Our Ugandan farmers have never needed your help more than they do right now. 

From our land to yours,

The Native Seeds Project team

It's wonderful to imagine a forest where there was no forest before.  To see that dream become a reality is a process that provides profound secondary benefits of personal satisfaction and learning.  Planting a forest is something a human being can do in a lifetime.  Or half a lifetime.  Or in a few years.  It's a beautiful path and one that is more accessible than you might think.  Planting trees where trees are needed is a proud feat, a reason to hold one's head high.

And as such we celebrate today a group of people who saw it worthy of their attention, attractive to their pragmatism, and needing of their action to plant the trees back into a landscape denuded of forest cover. 

You see, Northern Uganda used to possess an incredible mosaic of forest, savannah, farm, and pasture. Grazing areas, wild hunting grounds, rivers lined by monkey-dangled riparian thickets, fruit trees and wild fruit trees, agroforestry systems that are similar to ones that were here thousands of years ago, when millet cultivation and diversification became high arts amidst the emergence of Bantu movement influence from the south that imposed sorghum and new languages. 

More recently, in the last two centuries land usage patterns have changed dramatically in Uganda.  The mosaic landscape described above is still there, just in a damaged, degraded state.  By some calculations, Uganda has lost 80% of the forest cover it once had.  And most of this loss has happened in the last 50 years.  Violent conflict into the 00's saw the army burning down forests thought to shelter rebels.  Today, over a million South Sudanese refugees from just across the border forage for firewood in some of the few remaining forest stands, found adjacent to the semi-permanent refugee settlements.   

In the language most spoken in Northern Ugandan, Acholi-Luo, a Nilotic and a tonal language, the word for tree is the same as the word for medicine.  This fact is not lost on the region's many traditional healers, who implement their profound herbalist knowledge in service of the health of over 60% of Ugandans – the percentage of the population that reports lack of access to modern health care facilities, and whose principal healthcare recourse is with medicine men and women.  The loss of forests has resulted in a direct loss of healthcare resources, and at a time when the region is just recovering from violent conflict. 

The Wise Women of Uganda raised the flag of reforestation over 5 years ago, and since then have produced hundreds of thousands of native tree seedlings in their nurseries, planting trees in refugee settlements as well as on the lands of smallholder farmers in Northern Uganda.  This year the Wise Women, in collaboration with Wild Forests and Fauna, have completed the latest annual tree planting campaign with our widening farmer network, reaching more villages, more villagers, and planting more species than before. The images attach share some highlights directly from the field. 

Each time we update our amazing support base via GlobalGiving, we have been so thrilled to see your response and support of the extraordinary work being carried out by the Wise Women.  Now we're asking your help to organize for a new challenge.  As climate change and deforestation continue to present series challenges to Uganda's farmers, we have recently been astonished at the appearance of a new scourge – locusts that are now ravaging Northern Uganda.  We are asking your support at this time to purchase additional protective netting to isolate the tree nurseries from the devastating presence of these Biblical insects.  We know it sounds too crazy to be true, but it's true.

In the spirit of hope and of rebuilding lost forests,