Sustainability Impact Assessment Workshop Nairobi

A Sustainable Impact Assessment (SIA) exercise was carried out with urban farmers and county agricultural extension officers in the study area, in order to understand the impacts of the urban farming activities in Nairobi. The study established that urban gardening for self-supply had the highest positive impact on the environment, particularly on ‘ecoefficiency for abiotic resource use’, followed by ‘provision of ecological habitats and biodiversity’ and ‘reduction on transportation costs’. Urban gardening for commercial purposes had considerably lower positive environmental impacts, with medium level impacts on the same items and ranking as urban gardening for self-supply. Direct on-farm and off-farm sales had the lowest positive environmental impacts overall.

Urban gardening for commercial purposes, community supported agriculture and direct on-farm sales and direct off-farm sales had the highest positive economic impacts compared to urban gardening for self-supply. The highest economic impact was felt on generating employment along the food chain, enhancing regional viability and competitiveness, generating long-term profitability. The lowest economic impact was felt on enhancing transportation efficiency.

It was evident that urban gardening for self-supply had lower economic impacts overall than all the other forms of urban gardening for small or large-scale commercial purposes.

The highest positive impacts overall for all the urban gardening types were felt socially. Thus, all the five types of urban gardening had high positive social impacts, particularly on food quality, food safety and human health, food security and sovereignty. Overall, urban gardening had higher social impacts with degrees increase on food quality, security and sovereignty, viability on traditions and cultures. Direct on-farm sales had slightly high degree impacts on food safety and human health, while urban gardening for commercial purposes and community supported agriculture had medium level high degrees on safety, security and sovereignty.

All five short food chain assessed by Kenyan experts rated highest in their social aspects of sustainability. Overall, per food chain type, urban gardening for self-supply had the highest impact with an average mean of 2.11. This was followed by urban gardening for commercial purposes (2.04) and, closely related to this, direct sales on-farm (1.96). Direct sales off-farm and community supported agriculture (CSA) scored comparable low impacts. The low ranking for the former relates to the fact that most farm produce was sold on-farm, mostly to immediate neighbours and well-established regular clients. On the other hand, community-based farming (Nairobi’s variant of CSA) is still a relatively new phenomenon in the city and as such it could be assumed that its real impact has yet to be felt, more so given that most of the participating groups had been in existence for only short periods and were still in the process of establishing themselves as serious farming groups. Thus, the results show than urban farming in Nairobi has a low impact as a commercial farming activity. This can be attributed to the scarcity of land. Beside this it might be the case that most urban farmers in Nairobi do not practice UG for commercial purposes, rather for social reasons associated with first, food quality, followed by safety and health, security and sovereignty ), transferability and traceability.


Table KE1 KE1.1
Figure: Results of the Nairobi workshop.