Greening Kaptagat: Establishing agroforestry and clean energy solutions within aforest-based landscape

• Kaptagat is an area of high biodiversity and acts both as a carbon sink and a water tower, providing water to six surrounding counties
• Kaptagat is also used as a training ground for Olympic athletes, including Eliud Kipchoge whose foundation provided support to the project
• Kenya has set an NDC goal of reducing emissions by 32% against the BAU scenario of 143 MtCO2eq. Restoration of carbon sinks and greening of local energy and agricultural practices will be key steps to achieving this
• People in Kaptagat experience poor access to water, limited income generating activities, farming losses due to the overall degraded landscape, and unsustainable home energy practices
• Landscape restoration initiatives and promotion of clean energy solutions could help address the triple challenges of conservation, climate change and poverty reduction

Through a range of capacity building and stakeholder engagement activities, the project successfully improved local livelihoods and increased forest restoration in the Kaptagat region.

Key outputs of the project included:

• Kaptagat Integrated Landscape Restoration Plan, providing a roadmap towards coordinated restoration of deforested and degraded forests and farmlands. The roadmap shaped the activities undertaken to enhance livelihoods of local communities, improve biodiversity conservation and provision of ecosystem goods and services
• Training of seedling nursery owners and other stakeholders on topics such as planning and designing suitable tree nurseries, and opportunities for marketing their seedlings
• Domestic biogas units were installed with support from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry. After the launch, a workshop was organised to link different players in biogas sector and the project counterparts
• Value chain analysis for milk and passionfruit outlining proposals to scale up the value chains and develop sustainable business models (including blended financing options) for local commodities in the landscape. Alongside this, the project carried out business planning for other agricultural and agroforestry products, with the overall aim of identifying and mitigating constraints that may hinder production, transportation and marketing
• Communication and advocacy campaign that strategically used a range of social media channels, plus a high-profile event to influence county and national level planning and budgeting processes. The team worked with Olympic athlete Eliud Kipchoge to generate a campaign for public support to upscale the national implementation and budget allocation for restoration and clean energy villages

The project supported low-income farmers by enhancing access to resources for developing scalable and sustainable business models for local deforestation commodities. Local people from disadvantaged groups were trained in climate smart agriculture and provided with tools to support agricultural yields and use cleaner energy sources.

To ensure effective delivery and buy-in, the team worked with the local Community Forest Associations (CFAs) in Kaptagat – these bring together a wide network of stakeholders including: farmers, local producers, agricultural extension workers – a number of which are women, persons with disabilities, and youth – as well as other government agency stakeholders.

Specific gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) activities delivered by the project included:

• The provision of piped water to the local community through the installation of a solar-powered water tank benefitted local residents, minimising the exposure of women and youth to increased safety risks and creating a more efficient supply of clean water
• Support provided to local tree nurseries through training and the purchase of seedlings for restoration efforts, with an emphasis on nurseries led by local self-help groups, to ensuring local buy-in and assistance to local marginalised groups. This also led to the development of a funding system where members can borrow loans, creating local support mechanisms design to better help marginalised groups
• The biogas units support over 100 people to meet their domestic energy needs for cooking and other household activities. Similar to collection of water, collecting firewood reduced exposure to increased risks for marginalised groups, such as smoke inhalation from firewood and enabling a greater investment of time into other activities such as farming

The project has laid the foundation for local stakeholders and partners to collaborate and continue implementing the restoration plan for Kaptagat, whilst also supporting the scaling up of more sustainable and improved livelihood interventions for local people.

The project outlined key lessons for future interventions:

• Projects succeed when every stakeholder is involved in its development and implementation. Alongside this, community buy-in is critical in achieving success
• Simple, easy to implement nature-based solutions can have a large impact on both local communities and landscape conservation when clearly designed from the outset
• GESI related targets need to be clearly integrated in landscape wide plans, such as – in the case of this project - the restoration plan and Master plan, in line with the Constitution of Kenya

The project’s results are already being built upon as UNDP has begun to support restoration efforts in the landscape through the Forestry and Land Restoration Action for Kenya’s NDC (FLaRAK) project.”