Overview
Kenya faces enormous pressures on its key ecosystems, including forests, wildlife and water supply sources. The most important of these ecosystems from the hydrological perspective, and one of the largest remaining forest areas in Kenya, is the Mau Complex. Extending over more than 400,000 ha, the forests of the Mau Complex have suffered serious damage in recent decades, including illegal logging, charcoal burning, settlement incursion and excision.
Recent moves on the part of the Kenya Forestry Service (KFS) towards involving local communities in forest management and conservations are directed in part at reversing the trend towards forest destruction by offering local communities more of a stake in the future of the forest areas. True commitment on the part of such communities to conservation will depend ultimately on their ability to attain food security and adequate incomes through activities which are not harmful to the forests and water catchments. However, KFS lacks an integrated approach to promoting sustainable livelihoods for populations living close to protected areas, while restoring the ecological integrity of the complex by implementing effective natural resource management (NRM) for the watershed.
This project, the Sustainable Livelihood Development Project (SLDP) in the Mau Complex, is a response to a KFS’s request and focuses on technical support to equip KFS with an appropriate approach to sustainable livelihood development for forest border communities. The overall goal of the project is to facilitate the increased adoption of sustainable economic or livelihood activities by communities living adjacent, or in close proximity, to national forests and other protected areas.
In order to achieve this goal, this project centres upon the integrated application of two FAO-developed tools - Farmer Field Schools (FFS) and RuralInvest – and take into account the livelihood needs of both men and women.
The Mobile Phone Based Monitoring System (MPBMS) will be deployed in 2 Phases:
- 1. Phase 1: will initially be used to monitor the progress of FFS over 52 weeks
- 2. Phase 2: will monitor projected expenditure with actuals of the day, monitor repayments of loans provided to FFS graduates through the project funded Sustainable Livelihood Development Fund (SLDF).