Blog

Tanzania’s Rufiji River Delta hosts the largest mangrove forest in Eastern Africa, a critical coastal ecosystem that provides habitat for migratory birds and diverse marine life, stabilizes the shoreline, and traps sediment and nutrients washing downstream in the Rufiji River. Unfortunately, overexploitation and degradation of these mangrove forests present a persistent challenge.

• 09/10/2020
• Olivia Freeman, Dr. Mwita Mangora

The tropical air hangs over the Sierra Leonean coastal village of Gbongboma like a moist towel. Musa Lahai sits in an enclave of thatched huts, surrounded by women and children sitting around two cooking fires. Orange flames lick the sides of several large kettles of fish stew. Each fish was hard to come by. “Before, we were catching good fish. Now, we’re not,” Lahai says. He is deputy chief of the village, where approximately 90 people survive off earth’s bounties, from harvesting oysters, to deep sea fishing, to farming and growing palm fruit.

• 03/12/2020
• David Goodman

In Ghana, a changing climate is affecting the production of cocoa, one of the country’s major cash crops and its second leading foreign exchange earner.

• 10/29/2019
• Alexandre Grais, Lara Murray

Rivers are the world’s main source of clean drinking water, and their economic and environmental value are fundamental to the health of people and ecosystems. However, river basins face interrelated challenges — population growth, industrialization, urbanization, land use changes (including deforestation and land degradation), and changes in water quantity and quality.

• 07/17/2019
• Owen Scott, Fernanda Zermoglio

Gordon Mumbo grew up in the small village of Kamuga, in Kenya’s Kisumu County. Year after year, he watched as frequent floods from one of Kenya’s major rivers, the Nyando, disturbed the peaceful flow of village life.

• 03/28/2019
• Global Waters

Since the 1970s, the Sahel region of northern Africa has been experiencing ongoing drought. The ecological, economic and social impacts are far-reaching, and coastal and estuarine ecosystems have
not been spared.

• 03/14/2019
• CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry

In the districts of Mpigi, Rakai and Masaka in central Uganda, once-forested landscapes have been degraded by farming and illegal logging.

• 03/12/2019
• CIFOR

Along Cameroon’s equatorial coast, women are planting trees on degraded land, both in the humid terrestrial ecosystems, and the estuarine areas where mangroves grow. In some cases, they’re also gaining greater tenure security in the process.

• 03/05/2019
• CIFOR

To increase rural incomes and improve forest management at scale, community small scale logging and charcoal production come out on top.

• 10/30/2018
• David Miller

Can USAID work with the private sector to reduce the rate of deforestation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)? Can this be done at a large scale to increase rural incomes equitably?

• 10/29/2018
• David Miller

To assist the Government of Malawi and its citizens, USAID/Malawi designed the Protecting Ecosystems and Restoring Forests in Malawi (PERFORM) project.

• 10/17/2018
• Ramzy Kanaan, Gina Althoff

A network of programs promoting healthy mangrove forests has amassed valuable data on the state of mangroves in East Africa, built scientific capacity to track forest health, and now seeks to document and share sustainable management practices with local communities and governments.

• 10/10/2018
• Christine Chumbler