An Assessment of the Socio-economic and Soil Chemical Impact of Afforestation and Terracing on Sustainable Watershed Management: A Case Study of Mwache Watershed, Kwale County—Kenya

Department of Environmental Science, Pwani University, Kilifi, Kenya
Email: loksimoo@gmail.com (L.S.C.); b.okeyo@pu.ac.ke (B.O.); timamy.africa@gmail.com (K.M.H.T.)
*Corresponding author
Manuscript received July 21, 2025; accepted September 22, 2025; published October 29, 2025

Abstract—Mwache watershed, which had undergone a high degree of degradation, was put under conservation management using afforestation and terracing practices from 2018 to 2023. To find out the socio-economic, ecological and chemical effectiveness of the two conservation techniques, nine villages where the techniques were implemented were studied. Four sites were purposively selected to determine their ecological and chemical effects whereas ninety-two (94) farms were randomly selected. Mixed research design was employed for which experiments, questionnaires and interviews were used in data collection while also utilizing secondary data. Study results indicate that 53.74 acres of initially degraded land were restored with two villages; Mavirivirini Asili and Maweu achieving outstanding conservation rates of 92 and 64 % respectively. Soil tests revealed that organic matter and moistures were in high concentrations in farms where afforestation was performed while pH was higher at the control sites where neither afforestation nor terracing was performed. Extensive land restoration and vegetation renewal was observed in land under afforestation, including resurgence of vegetation such as Tephrosia villosa (kabalazi which had previously been depleted. Data analyses which were done using Microsoft excel, SPSS version 29 and charts revealed that produce of Zea mays increased 6-fold from 2018 to 2023 as a result of performing terracing with the watershed achieving an overall 37% conservation rate.

Keywords—afforestation, conservation, effectiveness, Mwache, micro-watershed, terracing, watershed

Cite: Loktari, S. Chemarum*, Benards Okeyo, and Khalil M. H. Timamy, "An Assessment of the Socio-economic and Soil Chemical Impact of Afforestation and Terracing on Sustainable Watershed Management: A Case Study of Mwache Watershed, Kwale County—Kenya," International Journal of Sustainability in Energy and Environment, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 80-88, 2025.

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited ( CC-BY-4.0).