Watershed management: the cornerstone of a catholic relief services agriculture strategy in East Africa

CRS has a wetershed management approach as the cornerstone of its agriculture strategy in East Africa. The approach is integrated with: (1) a market focus to increase farm family income. (2) health programming to impact on nutrition, and (3) disaster preparedness and livelihood recovery to ensure timely response and effective support to communities in need. Watershed management integrates technical, economic, social and environmental objectives. Technical objectives include: (1) the restoration of degraded land, (2) protection of cropland (3) stablization of steep slopes, (4) improvement of stream flow pattern, and (5) improvement of water availability, accessibility and quality. Economic objectives are to: (1) maximize economic returns to soil and water conservation investments, (2) identify opportunities to develop irrigation and increase cropping intensity and (3) link farm communities to financial services and markets. Social objectives include: (1) the identification of opportunities to promote equitable and secure land tenure and (2) the strengthening of the role of women as farm managers. Environmental objectives include the (1) protection of biological and genetic diversity, (2) the avoidance of negative impact on health and water quality (3) the avoidance of negative impact on community and family cohesiveness and (4) the development of a sustainable hydrologic monitoring system for the watershed. Within a livelihood framework, CRS focuses on cash crop opportunities that include groundnut sweet potato, pigeon pea, chickpea, sesame and Eucalyptus. CRS emphasizes soil and water conservation activities on private land:recognizing that these activities need to be subsidized through a food- or cash-for-work payment. This in combination with rainfall monitoring and farmer-managed technology demonstration, constitutes CRS emergency prepardness and response capacity. CRS recognizes the need for partnership in implementing an integrated watershed management approach and works closely with ICRISAT and national research organizations such as EARO.