No abstract

To achieve their conservation goals individuals, communities and organizations need to acquire a diversity of skills, knowledge and information (i.e. capacity). Despite current efforts to build and maintain appropriate levels of conservation capacity, it has been recognized that there will need to be a significant scaling-up of these activities in sub-Saharan Africa. This is because of the rapid increase in the number and extent of environmental problems in the region. We present a range of socio-economic contexts relevant to four key areas of African conservation capacity building: protected area management, community engagement, effective leadership, and professional e-learning. Under these core themes, 39 specific recommendations are presented. These were derived from multi-stakeholder workshop discussions at an international conference held in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2015. At the meeting 185 delegates (practitioners, scientists, community groups and government agencies) represented 105 organizations from 24 African nations and eight non-African nations. The 39 recommendations constituted six broad types of suggested action: (1) the development of new methods, (2) the provision of capacity building resources (e.g. information or data), (3) the communication of ideas or examples of successful initiatives, (4) the implementation of new research or gap analyses, (5) the establishment of new structures within and between organizations, and (6) the development of new partnerships. A number of cross-cutting issues also emerged from the discussions: the need for a greater sense of urgency in developing capacity building activities; the need to develop novel capacity building methodologies; and the need to move away from one-size-fits-all approaches.

The growing need to intensify smallholder farming systems to enhance food security for a rapidly growing population in sub-Saharan Africa constitutes a major sustainability challenge. Intensification of agriculture has often resulted in degraded, highly vulnerable, exhausted and unproductive soils. Even though smallholder farming systems are heterogeneous and dynamic, conventional approaches to improving soil management have focused on promoting one or two technologies, informed by coarse-resolution assessments, rather than tailoring technologies to context. This has resulted in technologies that have been promoted not being locally adapted. The research reported here explores the extent to which farmers' indicators of soil quality vary with land degradation status and gender and can be used in selecting locally appropriate land restoration practices. Knowledge was elicited from 150 smallholder farmers across a land degradation gradient in Rwanda through combined use of a systematic knowledge-based systems approach (AKT5), and a participatory knowledge sharing method for indicators of soil quality (InPaC-S). Data were analysed using R software through frequency statistics, 'ggplot'-generated bar plots and Chi-square tests of independence. Farmers described 12 indicators of soil quality with a mean of five per farmer. The four most frequently mentioned were: soil colour (96%), indicator plants (90%), crop vigour (71%) and soil texture (67%). Farmers' knowledge about 10 out of 12 indicators varied with land degradation status (p b .05), and there were other variations according to location of fields along slopes, and gender. Farmers had knowledge of 51 indicator plants and 22 soil macrofaunal species and mentioned seven soil management practices, including: compost manure (83% of farmers), livestock manure (64%) and tree biomass incorporation (54%). There were variations in the practices by degradation status, slope location and gender. These variations revealed the importance of matching management options to ecological context and farmer circumstances to foster adoption. There were relationships between farmers' knowledge of indicators of soil quality and their soil management practices. This research has shown that acquiring farmers' knowledge about soils can help to identify fine-scale contextual differences useful for informing the design of soil management options and it is recommended that this is done in future so that appropriate options can be offered to different farmers making them more likely to be adopted.

Coffee production in Uganda is done on small-scale farms containing a very significant tree component. However, there is little information on how tree species abundance, richness and diversity change in coffee farms as distance from forest changes. The main objectives of this study, therefore, were to assess (a) abundance and (b) diversity of tree species in the coffee production systems in proximity to disturbed and undisturbed forest around Mabira forest, one of Uganda's Robusta coffee-growing areas. Seventy-nine 0.1 ha plots were established in nine villages close to undisturbed and disturbed forest, and over 5 km from the forest. A total of 875 trees belonging to 63 species were recorded. There was significant similarity in species composition among the three study sites (analysis of similarity R = 0.09, p < 0.01; analysis of variance: F3,12 = 0.353, p = 0.79). Non-metric dimensional scaling supported these findings (stress value = 0.224 at k = 2) and showed that tree species composition in the three proximity categories was very similar. These results demonstrate that tree species composition and diversity is similar in coffee farms regardless of their distance from the nearest natural forest and forest exploitation history. (Résumé d'auteur