The Kassena Nankana District of the Upper East Region of Ghana is a vastly deforested region and currently many families depend on dry cow dung, guinea corn, millet and other crop residue as their source of energy for domestic cooking. Virtually every family has livestock, whose waste can be used for producing biogas. The lessons learned from other GEF/SGP project using the brick-lined fixed dome biogas digester showed that the design was too expensive for rural families. The project will be trying out cheaper designs. Unfortunately the large numbers of livestock, which are allowed to graze freely, are the reasons for the failures of most attempts at afforestation. GEF/SGP will also be piloting an intensive agroforestry practice with individual farm families on their compound farms (i.e. next to their homes) in which families will be provided with chainlink fencing as a revolving resource. Each family will be given the same quantity of fencing material in the second year so they can quadruple their output of trees and after the 3rd or 4th year they will pass the fencing material on to another family. The project will also pilot the commercial use of solar dryers.
The project has recorded a high rate of survival of trees after one year of activity.