Guidelines on sustainable forest management in drylands of Ethiopia (factsheet)
Guidelines on sustainable forest management in drylands of Ethiopia (factsheet)
10 April, 2019
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FTA COMMUNICATIONS TEAM
The Guidelines on Sustainable Forest Management in Drylands of Ethiopia contributes to the sustainable management of dry forests by providing information on the national context on dry forests and practical dry forest management guidelines adapted to the Ethiopian context.
Guidelines on sustainable forest management in drylands of Ethiopia
Guidelines on sustainable forest management in drylands of Ethiopia
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FTA COMMUNICATIONS TEAM
About 80% of forests in Ethiopia are dry forest. For the last 20 years they have been subject to land use changes, and replaced by agricultural land and settlements. This situation may be due to the little recognition, at the national level, of the actual and potential contribution of dry forests to the national economy, especially as a source of income for the poor and for exportation.
Despite this situation, the Government of Ethiopia has made sustainable forest management a priority, and it includes the management of dry forests. This Guidelines on Sustainable Forest Management in Drylands of Ethiopia provides information on the national context on dry forests, and practical guidelines adapted to the Ethiopian context. It fills important gaps that should help decision-makers to understand better the role and value of dry forests in the country. It shows that dry forests should be sustainably managed and protected for all the economic, social, and environmental services that they provide, and pleads for a better recognition of such an important ecosystem.
Picks and spades can triple farmers’ yields in Kenyan drylands
Picks and spades can triple farmers’ yields in Kenyan drylands
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A woman shows the state of six-week old maize crops within (left of picture) and outside (right of picture) of planting basins. Photo by Ake Mamo/ICRAF
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A woman shows six-week-old maize crops within (left) and outside (right) of planting basins. Photo by Ake Mamo/ICRAF
A simple farming technique is proving effective in staving off food shortages in Kenya.
The female farmers of Makueni County in southeastern Kenya rarely expect to triumph over their parched, unpropitious soils. A pick, a spade and a jovial, no-nonsense will-to-survive scarcely seem sufficient for a transition to greener prospects. In addition, the need for cash frequently robs these hardy women of men’s presence; casual labor in economic hotspots, or other work in livestock and poultry trading, is the norm.
Producing food thus rests on the shoulders of the women, many of whom are subsistence farmers or smallholders burdened with increasingly unproductive land. Severe land degradation coupled with drastic changes in climate has meant that many frequently face food shortages.
A flash appeal made by the government of Kenya and humanitarian organizations in July 2017 estimated that in the Kenyan drylands the number of people experiencing crisis levels of food insecurity owing to drought would increase from 2.6 million to 3.5 million by August of that year. Interventions are in abundance but few create an impetus to survive past a project cycle.
In her village of Mutembuku, farmer Veronicah Ngau has been working with government, development and research partners since 2005.
“Technologies like terracing and sunken-bed kitchen gardens have helped us cope but it was only in 2016 that I started to see a big change in what the land can produce,” she said. “In two planting seasons, I went from a usual 50 to 90 kilogram maize harvest from two acres of land to 270 kilograms from only one acre.”
This dramatic difference was achieved by nothing other than simple planting basins, which are a water-conservation technology that is improving food supply in the area.
However, social, environmental, technical and many other contexts differ from farmer to farmer and village to village, making it difficult to promote blanket adoption of the basins.
The most popular basin size in Makueni is 2 feet x 2 feet. Photo by Ake Mamo/ICRAF
As part of a project funded by the European Union and the International Fund for Agricultural Development on restoring land for food security, which complements the Netherlands-funded Drylands Development Programme, the planting basins, which are also known as zai pits by the Western African farmers who innovated them, are being modified and tested, not just across villages, but also in several countries across the continent.
The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), together with development and government partners, is leading the research component, or ‘testing for fit’, as an element of a larger drive to restore land.
“Thousands of farmers in Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali and Niger are now in the process of comparing options for soil and water conservation, tree establishment, post-harvest pest and disease control, livestock governance and farmer-managed natural regeneration,” said the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry’s (FTA) Fergus Sinclair, who leads ICRAF’s research theme on resilient livelihood systems and is the project’s principal investigator.
“We base this on a combination of systematic analysis of past successes and failures, local knowledge and participatory planning with farmers, extension workers and private-sector actors. It is not the basins in and of themselves we are interested in; what we are doing is looking for, and testing, options that are fit for their contexts while being relatively easy and low cost for farmers.”
Digging a pit is difficult work, perhaps more so than ploughing, but it has the advantage of being accessible to all and requires little more than a pick and a spade. Renting plough bulls operated by young, able men is not an easy option for many cash-strapped farmers in the area.
Ngau gave up on traditional tilling after three consecutive failed rains yielded stunted crops that were barely 30 centimeters high.
“Farming is a little bit like gambling here,” explained Joseph Ochola, a monitoring and data-collecting member of the project, who is local to the area.
“During droughts, the government will help us with 45 kilograms of maize per household per month; otherwise we have to buy what we need,” confirmed Ngau.
The Land Restoration Community of Practice is pictured in Mutembuku, Makueni County, Kenya. Photo by Ake Mamo/ICRAF
However, a 90 kg bag, cautiously consumed, costs KHS 2500 ($US25), which she says is a big chunk out of the KHS 6000 monthly earnings her husband makes as a casual laborer in town.
“When I started with 200 basins in a corner of my farm,” she said, “the idea was to compare the maize yields with our normal practice of farming. But in 2016, when we all lost our entire crops except those in the basins, I decided to switch and make more for myself; more than the project needed.”
A group of 10 women from her community of practice took up collectively digging three pits a week at each other’s homes. This gave them 30 basins a week but Ngau would also come home and dig three of her own each week.
“I have now covered half of my 2 acres with basins. Last season in 2017, during yet another drought, many of us with the basins were able to feed our neighbors who were not part of the project. They came to get some ears of maize every day. We were all able to eat. And even at harvesting period, I still got 270 kilograms, which also kept us going until the following planting season. I didn’t need the government handout anymore. Now others come to us to teach them how to do their basins.”
Scientists are now looking at the large data set involving thousands of farmers to explain when the basins are practical options and when they are not.
“This is only our third planting season and we are still in the process of collecting the data for all the different options related to the basins,” said Leigh Winowiecki, a soil scientist at ICRAF who manages the project. “But even in the comparisons, some areas have already been more than tripling the maize yields. Of course, it will not work the same for everybody.”
“Without this information, we cannot simply go and advise development partners to promote them,” explained Sinclair. “It will be a waste of their time and the farmer’s time to scale something that has not been tested and proven to work in the areas under question.”
Restoration 
Plantations and tree crop commodities 
Enhanced nutrition and food security 
Biodiversity, safeguarding and conservation 
Nationally determined contributions 
Bioenergy and biomaterials 
Blue carbon and peatlands 
Climate change adaptation 
Landscape governance 
Gender 
Silvopastoral systems 
Market-based agroforestry-forestry 
Farm-forest policy interface 
Agroecology 
Livelihood trajectory modelling and assessment 
Inclusive finance and business models 
Innovating finance for sustainable landscapes 
Public and private commitments to zero deforestation 
Orphan tree crops 
Effectiveness of approaches to sustainable supply 
Quality of FTA research for development 
Sentinel landscapes 
Foresight 
Seeds and seedlings delivery systems 
Smallholder tree-crop commodities 
