Resources

The Nakasongola District Climate Change Pilot Project documented and shared indigenous knowledge on climate change and contributed to the ongoing debates on how best to mitigate and adapt to climate change in the Nakasongola district in Uganda, while also informing practitioners' understanding of climate change causes, manifestations and effects at local levels. By creating awareness among local landowners and farmers on the value of indigenous tree species adapted to the harsh environment, the project decreased land clearing and persuaded farmers to preserve trees.

Integrating women smallholder farmers into the mainstream economy is key in order to increase their productivity, improve the quality of their commodities, gain a voice in decision-making around all aspects of the agriculture value chain and build adaptive capacity to mitigate climate change. NEPAD recognises the impact that climate change will have on African agriculture, especially African women farmers, and designed the five-year Gender, Climate Change and Agriculture Support Project (GCCASP) with support from the Norwegian government.

Thirty-six countries in sub-Saharan Africa have severe shortages of health workers. At least 2.3 trained health care providers are needed per 1,000 people to provide 80 percent of the population with skilled care at birth and child immunisation coverage. Nurses and midwives are on the frontline of health services in Africa. Ensuring that they are provided with the necessary competencies to work and function properly is key in reducing the alarmingly high maternal and mortality rates in Africa.

Bussi Island is located in the Wakiso district, which suffers a deforestation rate of 86.7 percent. The leading cause of deforestation is the increased demand for agricultural land, charcoal and fuel wood by a rapidly growing population. The majority of villagers often cook using the three-brick/stone method, which requires massive consumption of firewood, increases carbon emissions and has serious consequences for people's health. Over time, women that use this method of cooking may suffer blurred vision and lung disease.

Musambwa Islands are some of the smallest islands located in Lake Victoria in the Rakai District. Despite their size, they support large populations of African breeding birds like the Grey Headed Gull, Greater Cormorant, Little Egret and the Long-tailed Cormorant. Due to their importance to birds of global significance, the islands have been recognized as an Important Bird Area. The islands are known to be the largest breeding site in Africa for Grey Headed Gulls.

Farm Forestry (FF) presents opportunities for the improvement of rural livelihoods and biodiversity conservation in Uganda. In a recently implemented project (Integrating FF and Biodiversity Conservation), a multiplicity of grown trees presented great potential, but also constraints when it came to sustaining FF for biodiversity conservation_projects. The constraints can present major setbacks if actual values of crops and trees components on people's farm lands do not explicitly translate into economic values.

Anthropogenic pressures pushed the once productive waters of Winam Gulf, in the Kenyan part of Lake Victoria, into a degraded system dominated by nuisance macrophytes (water hyacinths) and blue green algae blooms, affecting water intake, lake transport and logistics, fisheries, hydropower production and tourism. Various donor-driven approaches taken in the past decades to remove water hyacinth were only effective for a limited period of time.

Lake Malawi in the Africa Great Lakes region is one of the deepest lakes in the world. The total number of fish species in Lake Malawi is estimated at approximately 15% of the global total of freshwater species and approximately 4% of the world's fishes. Particularly noteworthy are the high diversity of haplochromine cichlids. It is listed as a world heritage site due to its outstanding universal values. Lake Malawi is about 586 km long and 16-80 km wide covering 20% of Malawi's earth surface.

The transboundary Lake Kivu and Rusizi River basins are very important for biodiversity and provide many ecosystem services such as supply of freshwater, food from fishing and agriculture, pollination, soil fertility and erosion control, carbon sequestering, the provision of non-timber forest products, as well as providing aesthetic and recreation experiences. These landscapes are currently facing a multitude of threats arising from unsustainable practices and poor land and catchment management.