Home > Projects > TransVic
TransVic
Visit TransVic online
The Lake Victoria Basin covers an area of 184 200 km2 in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, and supports about 28 million of the poorest rural inhabitants in the world. Poverty rates in the basin are 50% or more, and are especially high in the lakeshore areas of Kenya, where the situation is further compounded by a high incidence of HIV/AIDS and water-borne diseases along waterways.
Lake Victoria is the world’s second largest fresh water lake and a main source of the River Nile. Accelerated soil erosion and nutrient runoff, urban and industrial pollution, and atmospheric deposition have induced rapid eutrophication (excessive nutrients in the lake), which has in turn led to prolific growth of the invasive water hyacinth .The presence of the water hyacinth is a serious health threat to those who rely on the lake for their drinking water.
In July 1999, ICRAF and the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MoARD) initiated TransVic, a collaborative project on ‘Improving Land Management in the Lake Victoria Basin,’ with finance from Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) and the National Agriculture and Livestock Extension Programme (NALEP), the extension arm of the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development (MoALD).
The purpose of the project was to provide extension providers, policy makers and researchers with information, methods, technologies and approaches for improving land productivity while enhancing local and regional environments in the Lake Victoria Basin.