An Overview Of Our Solution
Mount Namuli, a 2,419m “Sky Island,” or inselberg, in Northern Mozambique possess some of the richest and most-underprotected biodiversity in the Eastern Afromontane ecoregion. Namuli is also is home to over 12,000 people who live and farm on its mosaic of forests, grasslands, and fields. As human populations grow and soil fertility in the lower elevations decreases, increasing numbers of community members practice slash and burn agriculture in the high-altitude rainforest, a Level 1 Priority Key Biodiversity Area, and the headwaters for the largest rivers in Zambezia and Nampula provinces. Legado, with our Mozambican local partner, LUPA, are implementing a Thriving Agriculture Program to increase production and income generated from lower elevation farming to incentivize and empower local communities to take ownership of protecting the Namuli Massif.
Who is this solution impacting?
Community Type
Rural
Additional Information
- Population Impacted:
- Continent: Africa
General Information
Organization type
Sin fines de lucro/No Gubernamental
Ecosystem (select all that apply)
Forests
Freshwater
Grasslands
Oceans/Coasts
Population impacted
~ 8,000 people
Challenge
Size of agricultural area
~ 8,000 ha
Production quantity
~ 900,000 kilos
People employed
12
Solution
Describe your solution
Improving agriculture is the core of Legado: Namuli’s socioeconomic programming to enable Namuli communities to protect the unique high altitude rainforest of the Namuli massif. Community leaders have made it clear that if Legado provides an effective alternative to farming in the upper elevations, they will readily cease this practice.
We work in partnership with communities to design and implement simple approaches to increase water conservation and soil fertility in their lower elevation fields, largely based on the core principles of permaculture. Trained Namuli community members serve as change agents to spread the knowledge of agricultural best practices. Community members see production increases in their household gardens and lessons in water and soil conservation enable them to understand the value of conserving the rainforest and protecting their watershed.
We will offer communities the opportunity and support to grow high value crops. We then will work within each community to establish and support local producer associations and link those groups with established value chains to improve post-harvest storage and proper compensation for goods. Our solution leveragea agriculture, a sector familiar to communities, to increase food security, income generation and enable communities to achieve their legacy. A legacy that ensures a thriving future for Namuli communities and their environment upon which they depend for vital ecosystem services.
Implementation
Describe your implementation
Our Thriving Agriculture Program is in an early implementation stage. To date, seven trainings in permaculture have been hosted in the Namuli communities. Over 200 community members were trained in permaculture approaches and supported to create permagardens to practice these approaches on a small-scale. Community members who exhibited a strong affinity for the approach were further supported by the Legado: Namuli field team to implement these best practices in their larger agricultural fields. The focus of this initial stage is on increasing production of existing crops.
In the next phase, we will support farmers that have identified themselves as change agents to demonstrate proof of concept and spread best practices. Furthermore, we will empower women to take ownership of their family’s nutrition and contribute to income generation through trainings to establish and manage household permagardens to produce crops high in nutritional and market value. We will support the formation of producer associations led by members the community respects and trusts. We will then link producer associations with existing value chains for existing crops and novel high value crops in the Namuli region. Farmers will be supported to pilot novel crops such as soybean, cowpea and groundnuts which have established value chains and are ideal for smallholder production. Producer associations and community change agents will lead the effort to increase community-wide production of novel crops that are successful at a pilot scale. Due to the strong rainy season, transport of goods can be a large obstacle. Legado is developing a program to employ community members to rehabilitate transportation infrastructure.
The success of this program will depend on keeping strong positive relations within each community and providing continued support to farmers. Implementation of a successful agricultural program requires a sustained investment in each community over a period of multiple years.
External connections
Legado: Namuli is a collaboration between American-based Legado, guided by its mission to catalyze legacy-driven leadership to support the flourishing future of people and biodiversity in Africa, and Mozambique-based LUPA, an organization with over 20 years of experience in land tenure, conservation and sustainable development. We foremost partner with community leaders, from the Queen of Namuli to the cultural leaders in each community to design and implement the Thriving Agriculture Program. We work with local and district government officials to implement the program on Mount Namuli. We are working with RARE on a marketing campaign to increase community knowledge of the value of conservation and increase community ownership of the initiative.
We have the support of the Ministry of the Environment and Rural Development at the national and provincial level and they are interested in Namuli as a flagship community based conservation program. We have a key opportunity to help create community based conservation policy and to ensure agriculture and other key socioeconomic initiatives are core requirements for those policy approaches. Our work provides the government of Mozambique an opportunity to pilot finance mechanisms by which the government can support local communities to manage a protected area.
Previous and current funders include Rainforest Trust, Conservation International, CEPF, LUSH Charity Pot, Ethiopian Airlines, and other companies and foundations.
Results
What is the environmental or ecological challenge you are targeting with your solution?
Mount Namuli possesses some of the richest and most-underprotected biodiversity in the Eastern Afromontane ecoregion and is home to over 12,000 people who live and farm on its mosaic of forests, grasslands, and fields. As the nation’s second highest peak, Namuli presents a dramatic and stunningly beautiful landscape, yet its real value is its unique flora and fauna and the ecosystem services it provides to communities residing on the mountain as well as those served by Namuli’s waters far beyond the extent of the massif itself. Our solution aims to empower local communities to know how to, be able to and be incentivized to conserve the ~4,000 ha of Namuli's upper elevation rainforest and grasslands. Mount Namuli is designated as a Level 1 Priority Key Biodiversity Area by the Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund, as an Important Bird Area, an Important Plant Area, and an Alliance for Zero Extinction site, yet lacks any current conservation protections.
Describe the context in which you are operating
Mount Namul is the ancestral origin of over two million Lomwe and Macua people living in Mozambique and Malawi. Currently, four communities (approx. 8,000) have primary direct access to the natural resources of the Namuli massif. All of the Namuli communities (approx. 12,000) are governed by a Queen of Namuli, who is considered as the cultural leader in addition to a government appointed Chief of the Locality.
The Namuli communities are only accessible by motorbike via single track trails and range from 15 to 35 km from Gurue, the nearest town with medical facilities. The overwhelming majority of the population are subsistence farmers with minor income generation from sales of agricultural produce. Lack of access to markets, decreasing soil fertility and changes in rainfall patterns have caused major food security worries within the communities. Primary school education is available in most communities, but facilities are degraded, understaffed and attendance is approximately 50%. Communities do not have access to the national energy grid, drinking water is sourced from rivers and occasionally from boreholes that are in central locations.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
Legado: Namuli began in 2014. Our Thriving Agriculture Program began in June of 2016 and has since had two distinct benefits. First, trained community members have exhibited a deeper understanding of the value of conserving the high-altitude forests; largely due to the permaculture principle of water conservation that enabled community members to make the connection to the value in conserving forests to protect their watershed ecosystem services. Second, community members have begun to implement these agriculture best practices in lower elevation fields—we anticipate that this will increase production in the next cropping season and begin to decrease dependence on production from the upper elevation forests.
During the multiple year time frame required to achieve the gains in production in the lower fields we will work to create a formal community-based conservation area and implement other vital socioeconomic programming to create the overall Namuli Thriving Futures program.
Language(s)
English (Namuli Languages are Portuguese and Lomwe)
Water
Locally, Namuli communities are dependent on the Namuli watersheds for the rivers and streams that provide them with drinking water and the groundwater that nourishes their lower elevation fields. Regionally, the Namuli massif and watershed is the headwaters of the two largest rivers in the Zambezia and Nampula provinces.
Food Security/Nutrition
Our food security objective is that implementing these agricultural best practices will increase yields in lower elevation farms by 50%. Additionally, the establishment of household permagardens will serve as a consistent source of vegetables and crops high in nutritional value.
Economic/Sustainable Development
Through the introduction of high value crops, the creation of producer associations, better post-harvest storage and strengthening connections to value chains, we are confident that communities can double their current income generated from agriculture. In parallel, we will implement a community social benefits program consisting of solar electrification and a community education fund.
Climate
Conserving and enabling natural reforestation of Namuli's high altitude rainforests will enable continued carbon sequestration. A World Bank Mozambique project is interested in funding local communities to conserve their forests in return for payments from a national carbon fund. Additionally, given that most of the deforestation has occurred in the last ten years, specialists are confident that natural regeneration of the deforested areas is possible.
Sustainability
In the first phase, the Thriving Agriculture Program is dependent on grant funding to pay for initial outreach, trainings, community organizing activities and pilot programs., However, the long team objective of the Thriving Agriculture Program is to enable communities to have a sustainable internal source of income to offset the opportunity cost of conservation (ceasing slash and burn agriculture in the high altitude rainforest). Our program is designed so that our agricultural based solution to achieving biodiversity conservation will be entirely self-sustaining, requiring no external sources of funding and entirely funded by market-based revenue.
Return on investment
To date, Legado: Namuli has invested approximately $50,000 in the community engagement and permaculture training and support activities. The entire Thriving Agriculture Program over the next three years is estimated to cost approximately $350,000. The program is projected to have an annual benefit to communities in the form of increased income generation of approximately $125,000 per year. As the first few years of the program will likely not achieve the full increase in income generation, within the first seven years, we predict the program will begin to have a positive return on investment that will increase with time.
Entrant Image
Entrant Banner Image
Replication and Scale
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
Legado: Namuli is the first group to attempt to use agriculture as a primary mechanism to achieve biodiversity conservation in a mountain environment in Northern Mozambique. Legado: Namuli plans to refine our approach on Mount Namuli and then replicate this approach on the four other inselbergs in northern Mozambique with high biodiversity value. Funding for both conservation and socioeconomic activities (agriculture being the main component) is vital to success.
The connections Legado: Namuli has established with regional agricultural value chains as well as district, provincial and national government officials will facilitate replication. While Legado: Namuli focuses on working with local communities to empower them to be the driving force for conservation, we also have strong relationships with national government. Through our national outreach, Mount Namuli is now named as one of two priority conservation areas in Mozambique's newest national strategy for conservation.