Project overview
Community nurseries and demonstration gardens anchor restoration in a landscape affected by deforestation and extraction. School water and sanitation, health support, safe learning spaces and nature-based livelihoods connect environmental recovery with community wellbeing.
Community context
Kyenjojo District (population 543,998 per the 2024 census) sits under sustained pressure from deforestation and mineral extraction, limestone mining (feeding the Hima Cement factory), stone quarrying, and clay extraction. The concept note is candid about the human toll: pollution of the Muzizi and Mpanga rivers that households depend on for water and irrigation, child labor at mining sites leading to school dropout, abandoned sites causing accidents and malaria-breeding stagnant water, missing protective equipment for workers, and reports of sexual abuse of women at the sites.
The project lead has already mobilized the community and pushed local council leadership to engage the mining groups directly, though the mining groups have not yet met their social responsibility obligations.
Back to sections ↑Connected project systems
The project's core response is a nursery and demonstration garden producing indigenous and fruit tree seedlings, paired with agroforestry and community-driven conservation to build both reforestation and carbon sequestration.
Around that core, it layers
- WASH work in schools and communities (including girls' washrooms and reusable sanitary pads),
- a "natural pharmacy" staffed by trained community-based pharmacists,
- safe-schools programming with sports and arts for psychosocial support,
- and livelihood training, beekeeping, commercial fruit-tree planting, climate-smart kitchen gardening, aimed specifically at giving women affected by the mining sites an alternative source of income.
Three connected pillars
- Socially, the project centers safe schooling, WASH access, and entrepreneurial alternatives for women harmed by mining activity;
- environmentally, it restores indigenous tree cover and biodiversity while building carbon sequestration and soil stability;
- economically, it develops nature-based livelihoods and positions the nursery to become a regional seedling supplier, including pursuing government seedling contracts.
Leadership and partnerships
Masereka Samuel leads the project with the Kiganda Children and Youth Development Center, Kakungube Youth Safe Haven, and local women's and youth groups, under the Tooro Kingdom's traditional authority, with plans to partner with Tooro Botanical Garden and the Directorate of Industrial Training on seedling certification and vocational accreditation.
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