Celsus Senhte

Improving Livelihoods and Biodiversity Conservation in Farm Forestry Landscapes

Dr. Celsus Senhte delivering a briefing to Students about the program (Photo by Tusiime Loyce).

Farmer.

Bees.

Black pepper.

Farm Forestry (FF) presents opportunities for the improvement of rural livelihoods and biodiversity conservation in Uganda. In a recently implemented project (Integrating FF and biodiversity conservation), a multiplicity of grown trees presents numerous potentials, but also constraints for sustaining such FF for biodiversity conservations projects. The constraints can present major setbacks if actual values of crops and trees components on people’s farm lands do not explicitly translate into economic values. Without undermining the explicit and implicit values of trees on the farm for biodiversity conservation, it is important to help communities realize the opportunity cost foregone by choosing to grow trees and conserving biodiversity. Through our interactions with the tree farmers, we collectively identified value addition, marketing of farm produce, and more formidable local campaigns as key missing links in sustaining FF and biodiversity conservation.

The following activities will be carried out to enhance livelihood and biodiversity conservation in the Sango bay area:

a. Local campaigns to boost FF:
• Setting up of FF Advisory service groups.
• Introducing radio program/talk shows advocating for an increased participation by the local communities.
• Introducing social FF networks (involving the silent majority in forest management).
• Rolling out tree planting to other areas based on the shared knowledge values in biodiversity conservation and improving rural livelihoods.
• More sensitisation workshops and networking will be done to increase adoption of FF and to create more positive attitude towards biodiversity conservation.

b. Honey bees production:
. Education on production - the created FF extension agents will educate the selected stakeholders on purchase of bee colonies, management and production.
. Bee hives and bee colonies will be supplied to the trained farmers who previously participated in our first and second projects, and have evidence of grown trees to accommodate them.

c. Marketing:
• Market research to identify market niches for various FF produces.
• More Market information dissemination and helping farmers how to add value to various farm produce.

This will be done by trained market executives from renowned institutions, who will also be part of the project team.

To read about Celsus' previous project http://www.ruffordsmallgrants.org/rsg/projects/celsus_senhte_0 or for more information contact scelsuss@gmail.com