Prosopis Juliflora Control through Community Utilisation (Baringo County, Kenya)

Prosopis juliflora ("mathenge"), introduced to Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands in the 1980s for reforestation and fuelwood, escaped cultivation and became one of Kenya's most damaging invasive trees, forming dense thickets that displace native grasses, reduce livestock grazing land and lower water tables. By 2016 it covered an estimated 18,792 hectares in Baringo County alone, expanding by roughly 640 hectares per year since 2002 - about 2% of Kenya's drylands nationally.

Rather than pursuing costly mechanical eradication, which experience elsewhere showed Prosopis often outlasts, the Kenya Forestry Research Institute (KEFRI), CIFOR-ICRAF (World Agroforestry) and county partners promoted a "management through utilisation" strategy: training Baringo communities in sustainable harvesting and improved charcoal-kiln technology (achieving roughly 30% wood-to-charcoal conversion efficiency, well above traditional earth kilns), alongside fodder, pole and honey enterprises, turning invasive biomass into an income source.

Training-of-trainer programmes (e.g. October 2019 at KEFRI's Baringo sub-centre) and participatory mapping have built local charcoal value chains and diversified incomes for pastoralist communities. However, published research is explicit that utilisation has not reversed the invasion: Prosopis coppices vigorously after cutting and continues to spread at documented rates, so the approach should be read as a livelihoods and partial-containment measure rather than a proven ecological reversal. It illustrates a common and instructive limitation of "invasive removal" public-works models when the invader has high resprouting vigour.

Read the full analysis: https://www.cifor-icraf.org/knowledge/publication/8334/

Read the full analysis: https://www.cifor-icraf.org/knowledge/publication/8334/