Lake Naivasha Payments for Watershed Services — Flower Farms Fund Upstream Conservation (Kenya)

Lake Naivasha, 90 km northwest of Nairobi, sits at the centre of Kenya's cut-flower export industry - around 70% of Kenya's flower exports are grown on its shores, supporting an estimated 50,000 jobs. From the mid-2000s, sediment washing down from smallholder farms in the Aberdare hills, roughly 40 km upstream, was clogging flower-farm irrigation intakes and fuelling water hyacinth blooms that killed fish in the lake.

WWF and CARE International brokered a payment-for-watershed-services (PWS) scheme in which downstream flower growers - coordinated in part through Flower Business Park Management Ltd and other horticulture associations - pay smallholder farmers upstream to adopt terracing, contour Napier-grass strips and agroforestry with rosewood and other trees that reduce erosion. The pilot began with 565 farmers and had grown to roughly 785 participating households (out of about 5,000 in the target watershed) by the mid-2010s, with individual annual payments/vouchers of around US$17 per farmer plus in-kind training and materials.

Ecosystem Marketplace field reporting documented potato yields rising from about 4 to 10 bags per plot for participating farmers and described "dramatic reductions" in suspended sediment measured in upstream tributary samples, though those improvements had not yet been traced all the way down to Lake Naivasha itself at the time of reporting. A peer-reviewed study in Ecological Processes (2016) surveyed farmers' willingness to accept payments, providing independent academic scrutiny of the scheme's design and equity.

The scheme's per-farmer payments are small (about US$17/year) relative to farm incomes, and both Ecosystem Marketplace and the academic literature note that lake-level water-quality outcomes remain unconfirmed - reported gains are catchment-level sediment observations and farmer-level yield increases, not a verified reduction in sedimentation or hyacinth cover in Lake Naivasha itself. Long-term financing beyond donor-funded pilots (WWF/CARE, EU-funded follow-on projects) is not yet fully secured.

Read the full analysis: https://ecologicalprocesses.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13717-016-0059-z