This project focuses on the Manafwa watershed in Eastern Uganda, which covers part of the Mount Elgon National Park, and is impacted by increasingly frequent landslides, loss of forest reserves, soil degradation and droughts. The urgency to conserve and restore the watershed’s ecosystem services to a stable state of land degradation neutrality is huge given the recent landslide devastation. To tackle this challenge, mobilizing the local population is key, from farmers to policy-makers, at all institutional levels. This requires a bottom-up participatory approach, in which generating intrinsic motivation, commitment and collaboration to invest in the watershed are crucial using Participatory integrated planning approaches (PIP). The PIP motivates farmers to transform their reality by conscious collective action mainly by vision and capacity building to plan for a more sustainable future. This starts at farm level with investments in sustainable agriculture, and then quickly expands to village level and the entire watershed through farmer-to-farmer transfer of this intrinsic motivation to invest and farmers’ knowledge of innovative best practices. As such, the PIP approach achieves sustainable wide-scale change, not only in what people do, but mainly in how people behave and manage the watershed, with sustainable agriculture and collaboration as a solid foundation.
YLEC’s role in the project is knowledge building and passing on environmental education activities of the project. It will particularly train youth and Bachelor of Geographical Sciences students from Makerere University in Participatory Integrated techniques to environmental conservation as a novel tool to ecosystem stewardship and resilience building among natural resource-dependent local communities.