Mount Elgon coffee agroforestry living labs for young farmers

The Living Lab concept is a participatory and community-based approach implemented in within real farming landscapes. It focuses on building the capacity of young farmers to engage in restoration, conservation, and climate smart agriculture in the Mount Elgon region of Uganda. It leverages on the integration of experience from researchers, civil society, and local communities to jointly test and apply sustainable coffee-agroforestry practices that address challenges such as soil degradation, climate change, declining productivity, and biodiversity loss.

The Living labs are hands-on learning sites, but the individual farming households form form a bigger living lab community and are trained in soil and water conservation, coffee-agroforestry based on indigenous tree species, rainwater harvesting, crop diversification, and sustainable land management practices. The approach supports restoration of degraded landscapes, conservation of biodiversity and water catchments, and improvement of ecosystem resilience of the greater Mount Elgon region.

The Living Labs also intend to promote climate-smart agriculture by increasing farm productivity through small-scale irrigation systems while helping communities adapt to climate change dual impacts of too little and too much rains.