Abstract
Agroforestry practices can improve the adaptive capacity and resilience of local farming and subsistence systems while providing livelihood benefits to households. However, scaling up of agroforestry technology has often proved difficult. Many studies have been carried out to explain the lack of tangible impact, based mainly on formal household/farm surveys comparing characteristics of non-adopters with that of adopters. In this study, we mapped the relationship between agroforestry tree survival in villages that were a part of the Vi Agroforestry project in the Mara region, Tanzania with key social-ecological variables. A random sample of 21 households from each of 89 investigated project villages was used. The proportion of households with surviving agroforestry trees, varied from 10%–90% among villages. Social and ecological differences between villages were important explanations to this variation. Variables related to the project and its operations explained most of the inter-village variation in households with few surviving trees. To encourage the majority of village households to practice agroforestry their perceptions of tree ownership and the benefit of agroforestry were additional key factors to the project showing the importance of socio-cultural issues to the households’ decisions to continue beyond the initial tree planting and testing phase.
Highlights
Scaling up the establishment of trees on degraded land, forest and arable land has received renewed attention with the increasing concern for climate change [1,2,3]
After a slow and struggling start in 1995, the scaling up process started to gain momentum in 1999, increasing from about 5000 households to a total of 20,000 households with surviving agroforestry trees (Sr ≥ 1) in 2001 (Figure 1)
Aug-Sept 2000; households with surviving trees/soil improvers planted during the short rains in the end of
Summary
Scaling up the establishment of trees on degraded land, forest and arable land has received renewed attention with the increasing concern for climate change [1,2,3]. Agroforestry is increasingly being identified as one viable option to increased carbon sequestration and production of bio-energy that contributes to local livelihoods, improved food security and agro-ecological resilience [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Nair et al [4] argues that trading of sequestered carbon is an additional opportunity for economic income that can benefit resource poor small scale farmers in developing countries. Considerable research and development efforts in the past have encouraged agroforestry practices and have demonstrated the relationship between agroforestry and improved livelihood of small scale farmers [12,13,14,15,16]. The Vi Agroforestry Project located in the
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