Overview of Social and Environmental Issues
Generations of unsustainable land-use practices coupled with pressure from increasing population have led to severe land degradation in Ethiopia. This land degradation reduces agricultural productivity and fodder production for livestock, forcing people to farm and graze the land even more intensively to sustain themselves, thereby contributing to a cycle of poverty.

This cycle of poverty in Ethiopia is caused by multiple interrelated factors, and is difficult to escape. The main underlying causes of land degradation consist of socio-economic (e.g. population growth and associated activities including deforestation, overgrazing, agricultural expansion, fuel wood scavenging, etc.), natural (e.g. topography, soil type, drought/rainfall intensity, etc), institutional (e.g. poor coordination and lack of capacity) and political factors. These situations have a synergistic effect which leads to increased soil degradation, in turn greatly reducing agricultural and other forms of biological production, exacerbating poverty, and leading to the consumption of natural resources to a degree that is beyond their natural and sustainable replacement capacity. This accelerates the rate of land degradation further, thus creating a vicious circle linking human and environmental degradation.

Our Response
We started our work in Ethiopia as a partnership with Greener Ethiopia, focused on the Guraghe Zone. To meet the challenges faced by the rural communities where we work, the tree planting program in Ethiopia is focused on implementing multipurpose systems that restore degraded lands to productivity, while yielding edible fruits, livestock forage, medicinal plants and wood for fuel and construction purposes.

Our goal is to rehabilitate and improve productive potential of degraded and marginal lands, thereby improving the socio economic conditions of the participating communities. Our model is community-driven. We work primarily with farmers and community groups in marginalized areas, and full participation and ownership of the projects by those participants is considered crucial to the sustainability and success of our approach.