Since the Mbale Trees Programme began in 2008, we have distributed 25 million trees, for free, to farmers, schools, families, and land managers in the Mount Elgon region.

These trees have been planted in a variety of settings. Due to land fragmentation as families grow and split their farms, many farmers have less than one hectare to grow enough food for their family. If the land is managed carefully a sustainable cash crop such as coffee, beans, or bananas can be grown alongside a family’s food. All of these crops benefit greatly from tree shade, which can provide protection from the strong sun, and from sudden heavy downpours, strong tropical winds, and large destructive hail storms. Intercropping with agro-forestry trees is, therefore, the most common use of trees distributed in this programme.

Nearly half of the trees distributed through the Mbale Trees Programme are indigenous. Planting indigenous trees within these agro-forestry systems allows a wide diversity of plants and animals to live and spread outside existing protected areas such as the Mount Elgon National Park. This stabilisation of biodiversity through planting trees is important to the sustainability of the land in the long term. Uganda has a National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan which METGE use to inform decisions, and one of the key parts of this is sustainable management of entire landscapes. The Mount Elgon sub-region is of critical importance to biodiversity, conservation and people, and so the corridors built through agro-forestry which can be used by native species to spread, interact, and thrive are imperative to the long-term viability of the natural systems in the area.