SOUTH-SOUTH KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER STRATEGIES for scaling up pro-poor bamboo livelihoods, income generation, and environmental management in Africa

For millions of disadvantaged people in Eastern and Southern Africa, bamboo has huge potential to contribute to poverty alleviation, environmental protection and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Bamboo can be easily integrated into agriculture – including wastelands, degraded lands and in homesteads – or farmed as the main cash crop by smallholders.

During 2010-2013, INBAR successfully implemented the IFAD-funded project, Mainstreaming Pro-Poor Livelihoods and Addressing Environmental Degradation with Bamboo in Eastern and Southern Africa. The project aimed at developing livelihood and income generation options which also reduced deforestation and soil erosion, and contributed to environmental sustainability.

South-South Knowledge Transfer Strategies aims to consolidate and build on the investments made through this initiative. The project will mainstream bamboo as a source of income along the entire value chain, from growing to processing to distribution. It will be informed by our improved understanding of local contexts and markets and our existing relationships with local stakeholders in the three beneficiary countries.

The project has seen successes in all four of its project components, namely:

• Environmental management: By the end of this project, over 500,000 planting materials were produced, and more than 300 hectares of degraded land or at-risk watersheds and riverbanks was restored by planting bamboo.
• Bamboo farming system development: More than 5000 rural households were trained to plant and manage bamboo.
• Household energy production: Thousands of household representatives, most of them women, were trained to produce bamboo charcoal briquettes for use as fuel and to sell.
• Livelihoods diversification: Seven community production and training centres were produced (against a project target of two) to diversify markets, by linking with unemployed youth to establish business entreprises and train more than 1000 young people in the production or sale of market-driven products.

You can download more information about the project, including posters in Amharic, French, Malagasy and Swahili, below.

(Pictured: A Malagasy woman on a bamboo planting course)