The Centre’s vision is a rural transformation in the developing world where smallholder households massively increase their use of trees in agricultural landscapes to improve their food security, nutrition, income, health, shelter, energy resources and environmental sustainability.
Goal:
To become a partner of choice for a range of scientific and development institutions in their efforts to generate tree-based solutions to the global problems of rural poverty, hunger and environmental degradation.
Mission:
To generate science-based knowledge about the diverse roles that trees play in agricultural landscapes and to use its research to advance policies and practices that benefit the poor and the environment
Vision:
A rural transformation in the developing world where smallholder households massively increase their use of trees in agricultural landscapes to improve their food security, nutrition, income, health, shelter, energy resources and environmental sustainability.
Objectives:
ICRAF’s institutional objectives are:
−Generate knowledge by engaging in strategic research in the context of a few key complex global problems, and generate global public goods on agroforestry that have the greatest potential for improving the well-being of poor farmers and protecting the environment;
− Development-support by strengthen our role in linking agroforestry knowledge to action, and supporting development institutions facilitating uptake and scaling up of innovations derived from our research;
− Influence Policy by engaging in key global and regional policy fora where mainstreaming
The Centre engages with users of knowledge throughout the research and development cycle, and aspires to provide knowledge products in forms that decision makers — from farmers to global policy leaders — need.
Activities/Main areas of work:
Through the strategic planning process, the World Agroforestry Centre identified three key priorities to frame its research-for-development agenda. These priorities are:
Agroforestry for livelihoods: Research to address livelihood impacts of agroforestry innovations, smallholder-farm household constraints with access to quality tree germplasm, integration and management of trees on-farm, and market value chains for tree products (linked to MDG1 and MDG6).
Agroforestry and environment: Research to address tradeoffs in degradation avoidance and land rehabilitation, foster adaptation to climate change, enhance the role of agroforests in maintaining ecosystem services, and negotiation support systems (linked to MDG7).
Agroforestry and institutions: Research to address the apparent disconnect between local knowledge, policy and science, differences in knowledge and level of information, link multiple ways of learning, insufficiency of approaches and methods to handle the management and integration of knowledge, and the disconnect between agriculture and forestry institutions (linked to MDG2 and MDG8).
Global research priorities are:
− Domestication, utilization and conservation of superior agroforestry germplasm;
− Maximizing on-farm productivity of trees and agroforestry systems;
− Improving tree product marketing for smallholders;
− Reducing risks to land health and targeting agroforestry interventions to enhance land productivity;
− Improving the ability of farmers, ecosystems and governments to cope with climate change;
− Developing policies and incentives for multifunctional landscapes with trees that provide environmental services
Coverage:
South East Asia, East and Central Africa, Latin America, Southern Africa, West and Central Africa, South Asia
Beneficiaries:
scientist, policy makers, NGOs and civil society more widely..
