Plant 10,000 trees to grow resilience in Amhara

In this year's planting season WeForest was able to reach 1052 households with a total of 105.3 hectares of land. This was a lot more than we had expected! 

The main goal of the project is to work on using agroforestry systems around homesteads and households, and to use crops as for the farmland boundaries. This will help the household to diversify income and provide food for the family and fodder for the livestock. And we have been planting a lot!! 

For example, the community members have planted 34.000 coffee seedlings, 20.000 improved avocado seedlings and almost 236.000 Rahamnes prinoids seedlings. This tree is also called the “shiny-leaf buckthorn tree” and is a real money-maker as all parts of the plant are harvested and used for nutrition, medicine or religious purposes. 

Furthermore, almost 100.000 tree seedlings were planted to give shade to the coffee trees and to mark the boundaries between different houses and fields. 

Sileshi L. (age 42) is one of the farmers who has participated in this planting. He has three children, of which two of them are old enough to attend school and the youngest one is five years old. Sileshi is one of the farmers that is engaged in the agroforestry project of WeForest in Ethiopia and in his home garden (with 0.25 ha size land) he has planted 160 Rahamnes prinoids “Gesho” and improved avocado trees. In his village Abebe Yenurie, there are another 57 households interested to enroll in the 2018 agroforestry program of the project! 

Another farmer is Mengist Seneshaw M., who is 45 years old. His family exists of seven, including himself. In the land next to his home he grows improved avocado trees and different vegetables for household consumption. He also started planting castor oil trees, of which he now has six. The money that he earns with selling the castor oil, is used to buy chool books for his children. Mengist is not only a ´model agroforestry farmer´ for the project, he is also the village facilitator. This means that he is contributing a lot to mobilize the community and participates and facilitates the community training programs of the projects. 

Making communities stewards of their forests is the only way we know to protect and restore forests in the long term. The region of Amhara in Ethiopia is under severe threat from land degradation and soil erosion as a result of widespread deforestation: its forests are highly fragmented and extensive gullies also threaten agricultural land and settlements. WeForest helps the rural communities counter unsustainable forest use by providing them with training and involving them in forest restoration and protection.

Meet Alemayehu, a 40 year-old farmer who lives in the Lay Damot Kebele village together with his wife and four children. He was selected for our train-the-trainer program to learn about integrated land and forest rehabilitation. He is now able to train the other farmers in agro-forestry.

Alemayehu learned, for example, that coffee trees best thrive when they are protected by the shade from other trees. Last year, he planted 200 Coffee arabica trees together with 150 Cordia africana and Albezia gummifera trees.

Alemayehu also planted Rhamnus prinoides, a shrub that offers Ethiopian farmers a valuable source of income and is also useful for domestic use. The extract from rhamnus stems is used as medicine and in the brewing of tella, an Ethiopian beer. Its leaves are pounded into flour and sold. Alemayehu proudly said: “My coffee and rahmnus trees provide me with an additional income to cover my family’s health expenses and education costs.”

Thanks to your support, we can provide even more training to farmers like Alemayehu and keep adding to more than 1.2 million trees we have already planted in the Amhara region. These trees directly restore more than 600 hectares of forest, which are estimated to positively impact 8 500 hectares of land - bringing benefits to people, ecosystems and climate.