The project is a follow up on the capacity building that was support by GEF Small Grants Programme and aims to increase standing crops and biomass for carbon sequestration to address the problems of fuel wood, timber, fodder and other non-timber forest products being removed from the community forest ecosystem by rural people. It will promote growing vegetables and fruit trees in an agro-forestry systems on already degraded land owned by both community and private people. The project seeks to promote the interest of local farmers in tree planting and Agro- Forestry using cashew nut, citrus and mangoes as the main tree crops species.

The CBO shall include tree planting and establishing community and private woodlots for fuel wood supply for marketing to raise income for households. This will provide communities with increase food security, reduce poverty, and increasing environmental conservation as a twin track approach to sustainable livelihoods strategy.

The project shall provide practical solutions at the community level to address climate change through the demonstration of practical climate smart agriculture that can be replicated within the Southern Region, initiatives of afforestation will continue to improve the community forest cover, encourage swamp development to increase productivity and discourage upland farming which is responsible for reducing the forest cover, contributing to soil erosion and land degradation..

This project shall built synergy with other interventions in the chiefdom and shall promote gender mainstreaming. Women groups shall be involved in planning, developing and executing the project. The involvement of community in the pilot schools where nature clubs were established during the capacity building project will continue to encourage creation of culture of environmental awareness for children at school level. Capturing young people is important and beneficial to entire communities as these kids are their future. This project will build on the two school nurseries in the R.C. St Peters primary school in Ngalu and R.C John Bosco Primary school in Mendewa which were established for Environmental Education and Tree planting in the schools.

This project will contribute to promoting acres of standing crops (cocoa, Coffee, Cashew) to increase the forest cover. This will reduce soil erosion and land degradation, increase water availability which will directly reduce the time spent by school children to fetch water, improve the physical well being of its consumers and alleviate poverty alleviation through income generation from sales of cash crop products. This project will also compliment the ?Environmental Advocacy and Awareness Raising Programs? through community dialog and stakeholder engagement on tree planting.

The project will directly benefit 400 Community farmers (300 Men and 100 Women) and 100 school children (50 males and 50 females) and a secondary beneficiaries of 2,000 community people. The activities include 250 ha of standing crop comprising of nursing and transplanting of 10,000 trees (5,000 Cashew trees, 3000 cacao trees 2000 coffee and empower the community through employment and wealth creation. As a direct benefit the ecological integrand the landscape will be enhanced.