Nitrogen-fixing trees and weather-smart planting: how Tanzania's farmers are adapting to unpredictable rainfall

Laying down roots 

Boniface Mewata is an important member of the Udumka community because he has a passion for helping others. He trained in social welfare and worked as a para-social worker with a youth group in Udumka. This experience sparked his interest in strengthening his community and led him to his next role, a community-based trainer with CARE.

“The community voted for me to become a community-based trainer. I believe they had seen how I was able to mobilize a savings group of young people and work with them as their leader and mobilizer,” Boniface said.

The role is similar to a community advisor. Boniface is the person in the village people turn to when they have questions or need guidance about local activities and projects.

As a community trainer, he plays a big part in the village’s savings groups. He joins the groups to check in on their weekly progress, give advice, and help problem solve. The savings groups help members pool, save, and invest their resources together. The groups also use this money to provide members with loans and fund projects to improve the community.

In Udumka, they are investing in their land.

The Udumka Environmental Group is one of the teams Boniface supports. It’s a community-led ecological conservation collective. The group focuses on environmental restoration, protecting natural resources, and future-ready land management.

The group’s main project is its tree nursery.

The nursery is spread out over a plot of land with rows of ankle-high plants. Green leaves cover much of the field, but the space between the rows provides enough room for Boniface and the other workers to walk through and water the growing plants. Nearby, a wooden shade house helps protect the younger seedlings from the heavy rains and heat.

“The nursery specializes in species of plants that conserve water and fix the nitrogen in the soil,” Boniface said.

Crops can deplete the soil on small-scale farms, and heavy rains can wash away its minerals and nutrients. The Udumka Environmental Group focuses on plants and trees that can mix with bacteria in the soil to make it more fertile. This helps the crops grow even when the rainfall is heavy.

The group plants and manages a diverse species of trees in the nursery, which is supported by CARE and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Tanzania under the Her Resilience Our Planet project. The project teaches women, young people, and agricultural workers how to farm for tomorrow.

Her Resilience Our Planet

The Her Resilience Our Planet (HROP) project is supported by Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and implemented through a consortium partnership led by CARE Tanzania, partnering with WWF Tanzania, Tanzania Gender Network Program, Agricultural Growth Corridors of Tanzania, Conservation Farming Unit, and Shahidi wa Maji. The project promotes climate-smart and environmentally responsible farming methods to communities throughout the Great Ruaha River region.  These strategies will help improve people’s livelihoods, build farms, and produce better crops. The HROP project runs through 2030 and will train more than 60,000 small-scale farmers and 18,000 agricultural entrepreneurs.

In the nearby Kihesa Mgagao Village in southern Tanzania, farmers are working with a different kind of crop, potatoes. Bariki Kagine is a local farmer and said his potato yields are usually lower than he expected. Weather, like hailstorms, would disrupt his crops, but he was also relying on conventional farming methods that didn’t include weather planning.

Through the HROP project, Bariki learned climate-smart agriculture practices that included proper spacing, weather-timed planting, recommended fertilizer application, and updated pest management.

“What I learned through the training was different from the way I had been farming before. I saw that these practices could improve the way I farmed, so I decided to try them on my own farm and see the results for myself,” Bariki said.

He also used a new variety of Irish potato, Sagitta, better suited to his land, producing a harvest that generated around 2 million Tanzanian shillings.

Bariki and Boniface are two examples of how small-scale farmers and CARE-supported, community-based trainers are helping their villages prepare for tomorrow.

“It starts at home”

When he’s not at the tree nursery or helping with CARE’s savings groups, Boniface also runs a shop selling snacks and drinks. Here, he meets and interacts with everyone in the village. Through his many roles, Boniface works on a wide range of projects, passing along his expertise to the entire village.

“What makes me most proud is gaining knowledge and experience in different areas, agriculture, entrepreneurship, investment, and being able to share that knowledge with the community around me,” Boniface said.

He’s now supporting 13 different community groups. The Daima Mbele Group, one of the village savings groups he works with, is now exploring investing in agriculture to improve their livelihoods. Unfavorable weather kept them from producing a harvest on their collective farm last year, but under Boniface’s guidance, they’re hopeful. And they are not waiting. Udumka is moving toward a future better able to withstand changing weather patterns, with improved agricultural practices, an eco-friendly tree nursery, and investments to protect the land.

Bariki, Boniface, and thousands of other small-scale farmers, villagers, and community trainers are learning smarter practices for their farms and communities.

For Boniface, that means making the village a better place for the next generation, like his child.

“My work doesn’t only begin when I reach the community. It starts at home.”

CARE Tanzania was founded in 1994. Our work includes women’s empowerment, smallholder agriculture, and natural resource management. In rural areas, most people rely on natural resources for their living. We help communities use the land effectively and produce nutritious food while also conserving the environment.

We also focus on empowering rural women and girls. We help girls access quality basic education and our village savings and loan programs empower women, improve access to economic resources and boost livelihoods.