Integrated community-driven engagement for sustainable enhancement of food production in East Africa: the Jali Ardhi [Care for the Land] project

African farming communities are faced with complex challenges and choices regarding food and feed productivity. Socio-economic and cultural transitions, driven by soil degradation, climate change, population growth, political upheaval, changes in markets, land tenure change and migration put unprecedented pressure on the natural resources that support food and water security. Primary production systems are under stress, nutritional choices are changing and the relationship between development and agriculture is undergoing profound transformation.

In the face of physical threats of soil erosion and land degradation, East African pastoral farming systems are now at a tipping point, and there has never been a greater urgency for evidence-led interventions to support better, and sustainable food production and to reverse the degradation of natural resources that threatens food and water security. Central to our approach is the need for practices that move away from top-down externally driven solutions. Instead we need to use evidence from our scientific research to work with communities and farmers to collaboratively design solutions for real and lasting socio-economic change, and help those communities and farmers to innovate. We propose that sustained change can only be achieved through a thorough and deep understanding of community-specific needs and priorities, as well as the wider political and economic contexts in which policy decisions are made; ambitions which are at the heart of our local adaptation approach.

The aim of our research translation programme is hence to realise locally-adapted enhancement of food production practices that are built on integration of research evidence and community knowledge. These actions have the parallel purpose of both enhancing and diversifying food productivity and also restoring damaged agricultural landscapes to underpin the sustainability of future production. Our partner communities are 4 villages in Monduli District of northern Tanzania with whom the research team has a strong and established working relationship through prior NERC/GCRF research. Each community is experiencing challenges of severe degradation of pastoral land from lowland to upland with contrasting ideas and approaches to diversification and locally-tailored restoration. This programme will enable informed debate to optimise best practice for challenge-led and farmer-driven sustainable enhancement of agricultural food production. Firstly we will interpret through a local socio-cultural and environmental lens key initiatives from stablished paradigms of (i) Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM), (ii) Conservation Agriculture (CA) and (iii) Water Smart Agriculture (WaSA) and integrate these with established research knowledge of local crop and livestock production systems and viable alternatives. Secondly we will develop a predictive evidence base of how different combinations of potential land management and cropping initiatives might affect landscape functionality in terms of erosion mitigation and restoration. Thirdly we will support co-design of action plans for each community and initiate their implementation.

The success stories that we hope will emerge from this research translation action will be shared through the WOCAT [World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies] network and our established international networks (e.g. UN FAO/IAEA, NGOs, East Africa Community) to reach policy makers at regional, national and international levels. The action in this northern Tanzanian context will be further used to underpin future GCRF proposals to address sustainable land management challenges across the wider East Africa Rift System region and beyond.