Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
EROAHI
*
Development of an improved method for soil and water conservation planning at
catchment scale in the East African Highlands
A) Project setting
1) What was the background and motivation of the project?
In the East African Highlands soil and water conservation programs have proved
expensive to implement and rarely succeed in having any lasting impact on the
problem. Often farmers are accused of being conservative land users. However,
more and more people realize that not the farmers but the planning approach, which
is basically a top-down approach, is wrong. Experts from outside usually exclude the
farmers from the planning process. This results often in recommendations for
mitigating problems that are not perceived as immediate priorities by the farmers.
For most farmers the main concern is how to sustain and improve production, and
therefore soil conservation programs should focus on combating productivity losses,
rather than preventing soil loss.
For this reason in Kenya and Tanzania extension services use the Catchment
Approach. This is a methodology for participatory soil and water conservation
planning at catchment scale. The approach is currently applied at different locations
in the East African Highlands. The method has been reviewed in 1996 and the
EROAHI project developed tools to assist the local extension services to improve
the methodology based on this review. Main improvements are:
•
To make better use of farmers' knowledge on soil and water conservation.
•
To provide a simple tool for economic cost-benefit analysis of proposed conser-
vation measures.
•
To improve the planning method. Currently anti-erosion plans are developed for
each individual farm (farm-by-farm), whereas it is more efficient to start with a
plan for the entire catchments, because of the nature of the erosion problem.
The results are combined into one methodology that can be applicable for other
locations within the African Highland ecoregion, e.g., in Madagascar, Ethiopia and
Uganda.
*
Questionnaire received 2006; Project leaders H. Van den Bosch (Alterra) and S. Verzandvoort-
Van Dijck (Alterra)
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