Community Tree Planting in East Africa
📍Uganda and Kenya
The
TIST East Africa project supports
farmers in addressing poverty, land degradation, and climate change
through planting trees. It aims to improve the lives of some of the
poorest people in the world through capacity building, leadership
development, information sharing and work towards gender
equality.
This is achieved with an innovative,
community-driven and led approach to tree planting and
reforestation. This method ensures that local farmers are the
architects and managers of the project on the ground, which creates
benefits for themselves and their families, for the land,
and—through climate change mitigation—for the planet.
21.3 million
trees planted
48,353 ha
of land restored
7.4 million
tons of CO₂ sequestered
104,000 locals
provided with high-quality training
50,000 people
provided with access to clean cookstoves
50% of leadership
positions held by women
The TIST programme is not confined to a specific area; instead,
farmers participate from their own farmsteads. As farmers see
neighbours benefiting from direct revenue, fruit, fuel, windbreaks,
and climate control, they turn their farms into TIST areas too. The
program creates extremely powerful social benefits and grows virally
through word of mouth.
Whereas other projects prevent
carbon emissions, TIST trees pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere. TIST
trees also restore desertified land, allowing a wide range of
biodiversity to return.
TIST trees create new habitats for a range of biodiversity. Land that has turned into desert is restored, allowing a wide range of animals to return.
The individual tracts of reforested land create biodiversity corridors linking protected areas.
The parks that farmers’ lands border are biodiversity hotspots, home to many charismatic animals such as African bush elephant, East African lion, Kenyan cheetah, eastern black rhino, and East African wild dog.
Over 250 species of birds live in the area. On individual farms, trees provide habitat for birds and insects.
Conservation farming also results in greater ecosystem resilience through less drought, fewer floods, improved soil quality and erosion, decreased soil degradation, and improved groundwater and local biodiversity.
The project is training over 104,000 farmers in conservation farming which almost always doubles their crops yields in the first year and increases yields by as much as 400-600% in subsequent years.
More than three-quarters of farmers receive health education, covering HIV/ AIDS, malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis, nutrition, sanitation, clean drinking water and hygiene.
The project encourages gender equality. 50% of leadership and 41% of participants are women.
The International Small Group Tree Planting Program (TIST), our partner on the ground, was founded to support farmers in addressing poverty, land degradation, and climate change. Over the past decade, TIST has grown and today there are +21 million live trees planted as the result of participants’ work in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and India. This work not only sequesters carbon resulting in climate finance benefit sharing but also farmers receive fruit, fodder, fuel, windbreak, leadership development, HIV/AIDS education, general health information, clean stove construction, and social network creation.
