We are using an approach of 'Social Forestry' to help rural smallholder farmers restore their degraded croplands in Uganda's heavily deforested countryside (Kamuli and Buyende districts). Take a look at a few videos on our YouTube Channel (from a link under "Resources" below) to see our hands-on engagement of the local farmers in community forestry.
Deforestation has orchestrated land degradation in most of Uganda's rural areas over a long time. As a result, smallholder farmers in the countryside are facing several intractable social and environmental challenges firsthand. These vary from depleted soils resulting in poor harvests, long droughts and difficulty with livestock management, to constrained incomes and a decline in household energy resources (fuelwood).
We are working toward a threshold of 40 community tree nurseries, each producing at least 25,000 trees per season (twice a year) as to plant 2,000,000 trees per year. To ensure a sustained regeneration of the trees and to keep within our annual planting goal, we are embracing Social Forestry with a purpose that's twofold: 1) Capitalizing on community-managed activities to leverage project scaling 2) Giving farmers a sense of ownership and a role in the management of their community forests
We will enable smallholder farmers to restore forests and replenish the degraded soils--promoting food security-using nitrogen-fixing trees as green manures. The farmers will be able to manage livestock with qualitative fodder (e.g Leucaena and Calliandra) and to generate income from timber/non-timber tree products. Our goal of "1 - 2 Million Trees a Year" will be met by involving 2,960 - 6,000 farming households. Videos from our projects: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt1Kzg1iX96gALsZHj_756g
