Kenya country report on Measuring Agroecology and its Performance (MAP): TAPE application in the context of the Global Programme “Soil Protection and Rehabilitation for Food Security” (ProSoil)

As agroecology is increasingly viewed as a promising approach to render agricultural and food systems more sustainable, there is growing interest in assessing both the level of agroecological integration and the contribution of agroecology to achieving societal goals. To address both points of interest, the FAO’s Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE) was applied in the context of the Global Programme “Soil Protection and Rehabilitation for Food Security” (ProSoil) in three Kenyan counties (Bungoma, Kakamega and Siaya). Since 2015, ProSoil has been building community capacity to implement agroecological farming practices. The application of TAPE aimed at assessing the degree to which ProSoil’s interventions contributed to agroecological transitions among beneficiary households, and how the degree of agroecological integration correlates with multidimensional performance. TAPE results from 101 farms that have actively participated in ProSoil activities were compared with 100 farms that had not actively participated in ProSoil activities, serving as a comparison group. These comparison farms were selected from households targeted for the DeSIRA (EU initiative “Development Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture”) project “Enhancing soils and agroecology for resilient agri-food systems in Sub-Saharan Africa” (ProSilience), co-funded by the EU and BMZ and embedded within ProSoil.