Agroforestry World
Cathy Watson
Cathy Watson is chief of programme development at the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi. Before joining ICRAF in November 2012, she founded and ran two NGOs in Uganda -- Straight Talk Foundation and Mvule Trust. She was made a senior Ashoka fellow for social entrepreneurship in 2006. She has also been a foreign correspondent, working for The Guardian and the BBC, among others. A graduate in biology and Latin American Studies from Princeton, she has over 30 years of work experience in Africa with a focus on trees, youth, HIV, families, and communication for social change. She holds a graduate certificate in agroforestry from the University of Missouri.
Success in rejuvenating land through forest-based enterprises has had dramatic outcomes for farmers. In the late afternoon in the highlands of Malawi, the air is chilly as the sun descends. But the welcome is warm. A group of...
The Group brought together experts from ASEAN and beyond to provide critical input to key regional guiding documents The Mekong Expert Group on Agroforestry for Food and Nutrition Security, Sustainable Agriculture and Land Restoration was formed in early...
The Mountain Futures Innovation Platform in Yunnan, China is a new way to better understand upland landscapes for sustainable development. The Mountain Futures Innovation Platform was inaugurated on 11 January 2019 by World Agroforestry and the...
‘When the mountain turns pink, with the clouds rising along its top, and the goats eat more, it will rain.’ By Tran Ha My, Elisabeth Simelton, Le Thi Tam For thousands of years, the farmers...
Healthy soil is critical for productive agriculture in Africa. To address declining health, countries are sharing knowledge and learning about new technologies.
The endorsement of the Guidelines by the region’s ministers of agriculture and forestry paves the way for implementation to restore degraded landscapes, improve food security and livelihoods, enhance farmers’ resilience and meet nationally determined contributions to...
Zero-budget natural farming (ZBNF) is reported to be followed by 8% of farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India, making it probably the world’s most successful natural farming approach. “Adoption rates elsewhere of nature-friendly agriculture rarely exceed 1%,” says...
An international workshop has called for an integrated plan to regreen the region. The climax of the international workshop held late November 2018 in Tamale, the capital of Ghana’s Northern Region, was when the nearly 60...
A community in Ghana have taken only five years to restore their forest and are already enjoying the benefits. Samuel Abasiba of World Vision Ghana defines farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) as “a low-cost land restoration technique...
“There is an urgent need in northern Ghana for metro, municipal and district assemblies, NGOs and civil society organizations to act immediately to address issues such as land tenure, bush fires, indiscriminate tree cutting, and a lack of...
The participation of public and private entities is a crucial element in developing a monitoring and evaluation framework that includes the issues of all relevant sectors at national and sub-national levels. The Enhanced National Greening Program was...
Non-governmental organizations reviewed the proposed Philippine program of the Green Climate Fund and shared their climate priorities. In the past few months, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Philippines in partnership with the Climate Change Commission and...
Researchers highlight how the ngitili agroforestry system aids land restoration, in a new publication for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
Women in Uganda’s Mt. Elgon region are producing some of the best quality coffee in the country and are rising to an export challenge.