Sustainable Agroforestry Initiative (SAFI)

This proposed project will focus planting activities for the first 2-years and continue monitoring the project for the next 3-years to ensure planted trees are well established and free to grow from competing weeds. Our restoration implementation activities are determined and designed through series of education, town hall meetings, focus group discussion and baseline study involving the local people and the traditional authorities. The local people must agree to stop uncontrolled fire, agree to help plant and manage the trees, and agree to share the revenue. The traditional authorities, the custodians of the land must agree to allocate land for planting. Both activities are developed by the local people so that a fair and transparent system set up to share the revenue. Our implementation stages involve community mobilization, registration of the local people, training and recruitment of seasonal and part-time workers from the local community for nursery construction and management. We contract local famers to engage in seed collection. This is followed by site selection, demarcation and preparation. We engage the local people to manually prepare the planting sites. We supported with cutlasses, axes, hoes, protecting gears, transportation, food and water. After land preparation, we conduct pegging and planting of seedlings. We generally use 3m X 3m planting spacing. After planting, we conduct tree survival assessment. During this stage, we replace all the dead trees. Fires and competing weeds are major threats to planted trees. We maintain the planted trees by managing weeds and fires and occasional grazing. We manage weeds by supporting local people to manually clear their planting sites twice in a year. We recruit, train and contract local people to form community fire management advisory group. This group control, prevent, monitor and suppress fire activities during the dry season when wildfires are very active. We established fire-belts along the plantation boundary. We become part of the community and make our presence well established through project implementation. Our field officers live in the communities and provide day-to-day management and monitoring of implementation activities. The project monitoring team routinely conduct field monitoring once every month. Every six month, the project manager engages with the field officers to discuss the monitoring report and provide solutions to any implementation challenges.