Opportunities and Challenges of Scaling up Agroforestry Practices in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Review

Abstract

Agroforestry is land-use systems and technologies where woody perennials are deliberately used on equivalent land management units as crops and/or animals. Its systems combine tree growing with the assembly of different crops or animals. Hence, developing positive ecological and economic interactions between components, agroforestry systems aim to produce a variety of environmental, economic and social advantages to farming communities. It plays a major role in soil conservation and global climate change mitigation particularly due to its tree component. Trees control soil degradation through their roots and accumulate greenhouse emission (GHG) in their biomass. What is more, it conjointly helps in global climate change adaptation. It’s a long-time undeniable fact that despite our gift effort at global climate change mitigation (GHG reduction), there is an additional pressing ought to address the impact of global climate change (adaptation). Peoples ought to be acutely aware regarding the scope and advantages of agroforestry and that they ought to participate in the implementation and development of agroforestry within the country. Thus, this paper reviews different analysis findings on the opportunities and challenges for scaling up agroforestry practices. Therefore, the agroforestry system is economically and ecologically sound practices with an improvement of overall farm productivity, soil enrichment through litterfall, maintaining environmental services like international global climate change mitigation (carbon sequestration), phytoremediation, watershed protection and biodiversity conservation.