Growing restoration: from backyard gardens to agroforestry landscapes
Duncan Macqueen looks at how support for women planting small backyard gardens can grow into extensive agroforestry systems, climate-resilient landscapes and improved livelihoods.
Backyard garden allotment with beehives, sweet potatoes, citrus and multiple other crops, including soil-enhancing nitrogen-fixing trees, in Antanetibe Mahazaza, Madagascar (Photo: Duncan Macqueen, IIED)
In my home nation of the UK, August brings National Allotment Week, which celebrates the biodiversity and produce nurtured in the country's 330,000 allotments. These small pieces of land set aside for non-commercial gardening are a great source of pride.
Indeed, the UK is often called a 'nation of gardeners', due to 42% of the population listing gardening as a hobby. But in many countries, backyard gardens and larger collectively-run farm plots are not just a matter of pride, but of survival.
In Madagascar, the world's poorest country outside of conflict zones, women's farmer groups supported by the Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) are developing backyard fruit and vegetable plots and collective agroforestry areas to feed themselves and pay children's school fees.
Degraded landscapes where many go hungry
When I first visited the village of Antanetibe Mahazaza in 2019, a couple of hours by car to the north west of Madagascar's capital city of Antananarivo, I was astonished at the landscape degradation. There was hardly a native tree in sight. And when we visited the village houses, bounded by their distinctive, red clay walls, bare backyards were the norm.
Food security was (and is) a critical concern. Some people still live on only one meal of cassava a day. A local women's farmers group, Vehivavy Mijoro, was growing vegetables in terraced fields to generate income from selling seeds to market gardeners near Antananarivo.
But options to generate alternative income were few. This was one reason why the FFF decided to provide support for diversification for climate resilience.
Six years on, agroforestry enterprises feed people and hope
Returning in 2025, there were eye-catching changes. Many yards now have well-established plots of fruit trees, vegetables, livestock such as pigs and chickens, and organic manure pits. The women's farmers group members showered us with different types of fruit – joyfully describing their improved food and nutritional security. Agrobiodiversity is helping diversify nutrition and income sources.
Backyard tree and coffee nursery funded in part through the women's savings groups in Antanetibe Mahazaza, Madagascar (Photo: Duncan Macqueen, IIED)
The producer group has also set up a village savings and loans association (VSLA). This pools women's savings and then provides loans to members – for example, for setting up local tree nurseries of useful fruit, spice, timber and nitrogen-fixing green manure trees.
VSLAs often start small, but they are almost ubiquitous across the world's poorest farming regions. When they are supported to grow and connect, substantial financial cooperatives and credit unions can emerge – perhaps the surest way to mobilise finance. Estimates suggest that globally, more than 82,000 credit unions marshal US$3.6 trillion in assets (PDF).
Branching out using the same know-how, the women of Vehivavy Mijoro farmers group have walled and irrigated land using channels from an upstream dam, creating a substantial new coffee plantation.
Native shade trees are being interplanted to improve the conditions for coffee and provide much-needed fuelwood for cooking. This helps meet demand for fuelwood, which has been one of the main drivers of past deforestation. The women are also developing new enterprises, including honey production and soon, coffee – guided by evolving thinking on how to develop bankable businesses.
Three-year-old coffee plantation with shade trees restoring the landscape of Vehivavy Mijoro women's farmers group around Antanetibe Mahazaza, Madagascar (Photo: Duncan Macqueen, IIED)
Growing sustainable farming from local, to regional, to national apex-level farmers' federations achieves scale
The Vehivavy Mijoro women's farmer group is one of 300 women farmer groups that belong to an apex-level women's farmer group called PNFDDSA (National Platform for Women, Sustainable Development and Food Security). The FFF has invested $300,000 in PNFDDSA, allowing more than 60 of its local groups to receive training in agroforestry and tree nursery production, business incubation and market development, financial literacy, and savings and loans groups.
PNFDDSA is one of six apex-level farmer organisations supported by FFF in Madagascar, with a combined membership of hundreds of thousands of farmers. Each organisation supports many local groups to develop climate-resilient farming and diverse businesses.
IIED and FAO have published a series of case studies, including other examples from Madagascar, documenting sophisticated agroforestry schemes that combine more than 50 species of tree, crop and livestock – developing businesses for multiple products such as cinnamon, clove, lychee, pepper and coffee.
Many barriers prevent smallholder farmers from restoring their backyard gardens and broader forest and farm landscapes. Farmers lack many things: secure tenure, knowledge about what crops, trees and livestock to cultivate, seed of useful species, money to set up seedling nurseries, sufficient scale and market contacts to sell what they grow.
Working together in farmers' groups, associated regionally and federated nationally, farmers can get the support they need to overcome these obstacles.
The visible regreening of the landscape and improvements in material wealth and health of group members are a strong endorsement for the Forest and Farm Facility's approach. Financing farmer organisations – getting money where it matters – works for people and the planet and at scale!
So, while UK growers celebrate National Allotment Week, let's pause to remember the many millions of people for whom backyard allotments and agroforestry systems represent not pleasant pastimes, but a life and death struggle.
Policymakers and funders should recognise the lasting benefits being delivered at the grassroots by the Forest and Farm Facility and support it to grow climate-resilient farming in some of the world's poorest communities.
