As population density increases and agriculture intensifies in Africa in the future, policymakers, development practitioners, and farmers may
find useful lessons in the experiences of the East African high-lands. The highlands of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda face complex problems of…

The highlands of East Africa have been endowed with a combination of moderate temperatures, adequate rainfall (falling in two distinct seasons for much of the highlands), and productive soils that make the region one of the best suited for agricultural development in all of Africa. As a…

Low agricultural productivity, poverty, and land degradation are critical and closely related problems in the Ethiopian highlands. These problems are particularly severe in the highlands of Tigray in northern Ethiopia. Cereal yields average less than 1 ton per hectare in this region, and over…

Governments are devolving service and infrastructure provision, regulatory authority, and decisionmaking in many developing countries. Market reforms and structural adjustment policies devolve the provision of services and infrastructure to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), community-based…

In this chapter we introduce the conceptual framework that underlies the case studies presented in this book and discuss hypotheses about the effects of key factors on community and household decisions concerning income strategies and land management. We also discuss the influence of such…

Common property resources1 are important sources of timber, fuelwood, and grazing land in developing countries. When community members have unrestricted access to the resource, or when use regulations are ineffective, these resources are exploited on a first-come, first-served basis. Each…

Numerous methods are available for increasing crop and livestock production in the Ethiopian highlands. Both national and international research institutes have developed technologies that are technically appropriate for these conditions. Examples of such technologies are the broad-bed maker for…

Increasing agricultural productivity is an important challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Since the 1960s, agricultural production in SSA has failed to keep up with population growth. The situation is severe in Ethiopia, particularly in the highland areas, where agriculture is primarily rain…

Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world, and its population of more than 70 million people lives mostly in the highlands. The food security of these people is threatened by land degradation and droughts that cause declining and highly variable land productivity. Changes in the…

Under the regimes of Idi Amin (1971–79) and Milton Obote (1980–85), Uganda’s economy plunged into a prolonged crisis with negative real growth rates of GDP (Baffoe 2000). In 1987, under Yoweri Musevini, the Ugandan government introduced an economic recovery program in cooperation with the IMF…

Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa suffer from problems related to poverty, natural resource degradation, and the complex interactions between these phenomena (Cleaver and Schreiber 1994). In the northern Ethiopian highlands of Tigray region, problems of poverty and degradation are extremely…

This chapter focuses on the management of agricultural land by smallholder households in the highlands of Kenya. It draws mainly from several recent studies from the central highland areas near to the south and west of Mt. Kenya and the western highland areas to the north and west of Kisumu,…