Travels to Kenya, Community Meetings

Community meeting participants viewing important forest products identified during 2024 fieldwork

Dear All,

Warm greetings, and I hope this finds you well!

Friday June 20th was World Refugee Day 2025. It's a good chance to reflect on the unprecedented scale of the global refugee crisis. 42.7 refugees are currently displaced, with another 73.5 million people displaced within their own countries. At the same time, humanitarian support has dropped steeply in the past few months. In Uganda, 1 million refugee in Imvepi and other settlements entirely lost food rations recently, even as malnutrition rates were already severe. Many NGOs continue to do great work here in Imvepi, and I can recommend supporting: International Rescue Committee, Danish Refugee Council, and DanChurchAid. Advocacy with legislators in the US is also critical, reminding them that most Americans support sending humanitarian aid abroad.

Travels to Kenya

Entrance to the World Agroforestry headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya

I am fortunate to be connected with the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), which is the leading international agroforestry research institution. It is through CIFOR-ICRAF and good friend Cathy Watson that I originally came to Imvepi as an agroforestry intern in 2022, and am now a PhD Fellow under the mentorship of CIFOR-ICRAF scientist Dr. Mary Njenga.

In late May, CIFOR-ICRAF convened a weeklong internal Science Days conference for knowledge-sharing and networking between staff and affiliated agroforestry researchers/practitioners. Together with Mary, Cathy, my PhD advisor John Munsell, and a few others, we collectively developed a session on "Agroforestry for Transforming Landscapes and Livelihoods in Fragile and Displacement Landscapes." We shared about root factors of natural resource challenges in refugee settings and highlighted agroforestry solutions revealed through our collective research and programming in Uganda and other refugee contexts. A UNHCR rep also joined us with the key message that we need to "keep doing more" given that refugee displacement and climate change impacts are expected to only intensify in the coming years.

Speaking at Science Days, the CIFOR-ICRAF conference room, and, most of our session collaborators

During my week in Nairobi, I was able to spend time with time with Cathy Watson visiting her amazing efforts to plant indigenous trees along barren tracts of a city highway, with incredible results. As she writes on her GoFundMe page, "From a muddy desolate stretch of highway, we now have avenues of trees and mini-forests consisting of over 116 species of Kenyan trees, some of which are threatened." Additionally, Cathy took me on a 5km hike through Karura forest, a gorgeous 2500 acre urban forest, which is the second largest urban forest in the world! It exists thanks to the efforts of Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement which she founded (read more here).

Cathy Watson at the bypass in Nairobi where she has extensively planted trees and Karura Forest (right)

Community Meetings

Back in Imvepi, we have shifted from working on our agroforestry/biochar field trials full time to convening community meetings with participants of last year's firewood walks. One goal of these meetings is to share back research results. This is an important step that often gets missed when researchers collect data, analyze, publish, and never circle back to inform the participants of what was found. We are sharing data points with participants on distances travelled to firewood, the number of plants identified as food, medicine, and fiber, and some of the key forest resource access challenges for both refugees and hosts.

A community meeting with hosts in Ediofe Village in Imvepi

Another purpose of the meetings is to ask participants to share reflections and make corrections based on the results shared, as well as add new ideas or solutions to addressing the problems of firewood, food, medicine, and fiber access. Some of the meeting insights so far include:

• Refugees used to trade small portions of their food rations for firewood, and this helped them develop social capital with hosts. Without having any currency or food to trade now that food rations are gone for most refugees, there is great uncertainty for how to obtain firewood moving forward.

• Some hosts feel increasingly uneasy about renting land to refugees because they observe that usually it involves clearing of trees, including culturally important species.

• Hosts suggested that formalized land use agreements be made in advance of land rental to ensure that landowners and tenants are on the same page about the use of trees.

• Refugees suggested that NGOs help them to secure large land tracts where they can work as groups to grow crops and trees for themselves and host landowners.

• Both groups were interested in growing their own tree seedlings through community-run tree nurseries, including indigenous and culturally-important species, but lack teh capital to get started.

We have held 3 of 6 community meetings, and anticipate much more insight and productive conversation to come! Overall, meeting participants shared a lot of gratitude and excitement that we made the effort to come back and meet with them. Printed posters of plants identified in the bush have been really popular, with groups of participants gathering together to identify and name their favorite species.

Community meetings gathered with refugees and hosts in Imvepi to share back research results

Field Trials Update

Our crops and trees are growing very well thanks to some good rain in late May and early June. Unfortunately Calliandra calothyrsus seeds, one of our agroforestry species, did not germinate well, so we instead were (miraculously) able to find Calliandra seedings which were planted a bit later than the other trees. We planted around 60 pumpkins on extra land around the boundaries of our research sites for ourselves and to share with the nearby community, which are also thriving. Alex sometimes collects pumpkin leaves to cook at home in a popular local dish with groundnut and/or sesame paste.

Maize and Albizia in our field trial (left) and Alex with harvested pumpkin leaves

Lastly, I'll share this video of Mama Ester, who has been a dear friend since I first came to Imvepi in 2022. Mama Ester is an expert crocheter and seamstress, who runs a shop in Imvepi where she sells these products and also trains young people on these crafts. She dressed up in her own handcrafted outfit to celebrate World Refugee Day, and came to by my house to show off her amazing work.

Wishing all of you a good few weeks ahead, and looking forward to catching up again soon!