First meetings with partner villages to discuss regeneration of village land in the context of land use planning

On 7 ad 8 September, Jonas Kizima from TALIRI and Urs Schaffner from CABI met with delegations of two villages in Kilimanjaro and Arusha regions in northern Tanzania to discuss how native plant species and species mixtures can be used to promote the regeneration of degraded land in their villages. 

Together with women and men from the village administration and different village committees (e.g. for livestock holding, grazing management, wildlife conservation), they discussed and prepared the outline of a workshop that is planned to take place in October during which 20-25 village members will jointly identify the needs of the different stakeholder groups, the current distribution of land use types and their level of degradation, and how the project can help co-designing interventions to regenerate degraded land, or to implement new land use types that help meeting the needs of the village people. 

Possible interventions that were already mentioned during these preparatory meetings include the establishment of community woodlots, production of forage for livestock, regeneration of rangeland in homesteads, or regeneration of vegetation on heavily degraded land around water holes. The meetings revealed a very high interest by the village members in jointly test novel ideas for regeneration land with the Native PEP team.

Prepared by Urs Schaffner