| Local communities use science to regreen Tanzanian 'desert' |
| Today much has changed in Shinyanga and Tabora provinces, a dryland region in western Tanzania |
| Communications Unit |
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Mr. Kapesa, a farmer in Shinyanga, Tanzania, explains a point about fruit trees and fodder shrubs on his rehabilitated land. INSET: Degraded land in the same area. | Two decades ago former President Julius Nyerere characterized it as the "Desert of Tanzania." Today much has changed in Shinyanga and Tabora provinces, a dryland region in western Tanzania.
Gradually and steadily, residents are reclaiming large parcels of land through the efforts of their communities and public sector agencies. They are rehabilitating once-thriving dryland ecosystems using science-based agroforestry techniques.
In Shinyanga Province alone, scientists estimate that some 350,000 hectares of land have been rehabilitated. Current estimates show that more than half of Tanzania’s land is highly degraded, about 40 million hectares.
Historians note that up until the early part of the 20th Century, western Tanzania was home to a thriving woodland eco-system that had a large diversity of flora and fauna and easily supported livelihoods of its people. By the 1920, however, things had begun to change.
Policies put in place by the colonial government - often with little knowledge of local conditions or an appreciation for the inherent fragility of the region’s natural resources - proved highly disruptive. With little foresight, the new policies encouraged the conversion of woodland areas to agriculture, a policy that severely taxed dryland soils and disrupted traditional land use systems.
No one is quite sure why this was allowed to take place, as the result was virtually pre-ordained, but one explanation is that the colonial government sought to eradicate the tsetse fly scourge that limited cattle rearing. In doing so, it created conditions perfect for overgrazing, quickly overwhelming the carrying capacity of the land. Subsequent efforts by the World Bank and other agencies in the 1960s and 70s to reforest the region failed to stem the loss of indigenous woodlands, mainly because the projects lacked scientific rigor and an understanding of local environments and cultures required for scaling up.
Indeed, by the time President Nyerere made his comment about the area becoming a Tanzanian desert, many observers believed that the region’s decline could not be reversed. Happily, that view would prove to be wrong.
Ngitili: Prize Winning R&D
In 1988, researchers identified the main land use constraints in the agropastoralist region of western Tanzania as inadequate fodder, shortages of wood products, soil degradation, declining crop yields and insecure land tenure. Three years later, scientists from World Agroforestry Centre joined agencies in the region that were working on projects to check environmental degradation.
The Centre focused mainly on research to support the activities of HASHI, an award-winning region-wide development programme (UN Equator Prize 2002) that effectively brought together science, extension, and financial services.
Working with various partners, scientists from the Centre began by carrying out a survey that identified five agroforestry technologies as key to reclaiming the degraded ecosystem. These techniques included rotational woodlots, improved fallow, fodder bank, domestication of traditional medicinal trees and fruit trees — all land management techniques that built on traditional knowledge.
The research team identified total of 56 tree species were introduced on farms. This was followed by training various stakeholders, including extension workers, to disseminate the chosen agroforestry technologies and encourage local communities to adopt them.
To varying degrees, the efforts by the HASHI and other projects implemented by more than a dozen agencies proved effective in stabilizing large land areas and gradually reversing the damage caused by years of misuse.
The HASHI project’s biggest successes, observers say, was in its use of Ngitili, a traditional land use system in which large areas of land are set aside by communities and individuals to ensure that forage is available for draft animals at the end of the dry season. Community Ngitili set aside usually cover about 50 hectares, while those of individual farmers are far smaller.
In a Ngitili system, vegetation and trees are nurtured on fallow land during the five-month-long rainy season. By mutual agreement of the community, animals are kept away from the Ngitili so that fodder is available during drier months. In 2003, economists estimated that more than 800 villages were using different variations of Ngitili systems.
Subsequent studies showed that Ngitili had had a substantial impact on local incomes, contributing up to USD500 to each household every year, a large sum in rural Tanzania. In addition, the practice greatly reduced women’s labour, cutting the time spent on searching for fuelwood by over 80%, and had a highly positive impact on biodiversity.
Contact: Aichi Kitalyi, A.kitalyi@cgiar.org
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