EthioTrees – Supporting Landless Farmers in the Tembien Highlands // GO BACK
The project aims to improve rural household income for landless farmers in villages of the North Ethiopian Highlands by supporting woodland restoration and ecosystem-services development.
Actively Contributes To
Actively Contributes To
- Community members are engaged in a variety of income-generating purposes. The project provides capacity-building to nurture seedlings at community-nurseries and then plant and protect the saplings.
- Alongside this, the project targets women and young adults for training in additional livelihood initiatives to satisfy their nutritional, financial and energy needs These initiatives include apiculture, agroforestry and fodder production.
- Locals are trained to harvest grasses sustainably through a cut and carry system, which will then be divided amongst community members to feed livestock in place of open grazing.
Actively Contributes To
- Ethiotrees works with associations of landless farmers to tap and process francincense into aromatic oils
- The project has established a distillation centre for the community to produce francincense essential oil
- Production of ‘white honey’, a local delicacy, through the introduction of bee hives. White honey is sold on local markets and provides an additional income stream for the community.
Actively Contributes To
- The project seeks to reverse the historic impacts of ecosystem degradation in the landscape by increasing above-ground vegetation and biodiversity. In doing so, carbon will be drawn out of the atmosphere and stored in the vegetation and soil. This will help reduce the negative effects of climate change.
Actively Contributes To
- Project works to restore and protect exclosures that are managed by landless farmers.
- Through better management of exclosures, rainwater infiltration helps to stablisie groundwater tables. This provides an opportunity for irrigation agriculture
Located at the northernmost limit of the African monsoons, the North Ethiopian Highlands are a hotspot of vulnerability to land degradation and climatic changes. In areas across Ethiopia, a variety of non-timber forest products can bring substantial amounts of cash income to farmer households. However, the significant potential of non-timber forest production remains largely untapped. To date, in Northern Ethiopia, there is not enough attention to the participatory development of community-wide benefits such as carbon storage, flood reduction and non-timber forest production when establishing exclosures.
To counter these problems, this project aims to boost community-driven woodland restoration on large and highly degraded slopes where cattle grazing is excluded. This will store carbon in the supported woodlands, both as soil organic carbon and above-ground biomass, and support ecosystem services development and valorisation through increasing groundwater availability, honey production and frankincense (oil) production for landless farmers.
The project aims to boost biodiversity status, soil organic carbon, biomass, groundwater recharge, and cash income for landless farmers. The vast majority of the farmers identify the lack of access to drinking water as the main problem for their livelihood. The landless participants derive significantly less income from sales of agricultural products and sales of livestock as compared to farmers with land.
| ABOUT THE PROJECT |
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| Location:
Tembien Highlands (Ethiopia) |
| Operational Since:
2016 |
| Project Coordinator:
EthioTrees |
| PVCs Issued to date:
26,070 |
| Area of Land under Management:
1,892 ha |
| Participants:
18 communities |
Project Interventions:
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| Milestones: |
| Coordinator Details: |
Project Location
Annual
Reports
Additional
Documents
December 2019 | The BBC World Service interviewed Seifu Gebreselassie, project coordinator of EthioTrees Ethiopia, and showcased the benefits of the EthioTrees project as an example of how countries, such as Ethiopia, can tackle degrading landscapes. Watch the BBC report
October 2019 | Over the past year, the EthioTrees project cooperated with the Spring (publishing house) initiative to finalize a “tourist” GeoGuide for the Tembien Highlands. The GeoGuide series publishes travel guide type short monographs focused on areas and regions of geo-morphological and geological importance including Geoparks, National Parks, World Heritage areas and Geosites. The GeoGuide of Dogua Tembien was published in July 2019. You can find the guide here
October 2019 | The project has worked with Davines, a high-end hair and beauty brand in Italy, to create a stunning new project video. It shows the positive environmental and livelihood benefits that the project is having for communities in Ethiopia. You can watch the video here
March 2019 | Further collaboration has taken place between Ghent University (Belgium) and Mekelle University (Ethiopia) through the South Initiative programme. In 2018, the programme provided 5 Ethiopian MSc students and 2 Belgian MSc students research access to the Ethiotrees project. Read more