Despite its potential to adapt local food production to changing climate conditions, the adoption rate of agroforestry technologies in sub-Saharan Africa is still considerably low \citep{ndjeunga2005uptake}. 8% of the world population is involved in agroforestry, with the majority being located in Southeast Asia, Central America and South America \citep{worldagroforestrycentre}. This section discusses the challenges for agroforestry as a result of possibly impeding barriers that need to be overcome for its widespread adoption in sub-Saharan Africa. Empirical studies highlight that two different situations have to be distinguished \citep{Dahlquist_2007,Kiptot_2007}: (1) a temporary adoption of agroforestry methods with a subsequent dismissal at a later stage and (2) no adoption due to impeding barriers. For the scope of this paper we primarily focus on cases in which agroforestry is not adopted at all in order to investigate the challenges that need to be addressed by policy-makers and future research.
A lack of adoption leads to the presumption of existing barriers that hinder smallholder farmers to adopt agroforestry methods. Therefore it is important to understand the factors that affect farmers’ choices in the decision-making process. A schematic relationship developed by the ’Edinburgh Study of Decision Making on Farms’ (see Figure \ref{Edinburgh}), suggests that smallholder farmers’ choices depend on personal factors, i.e. attitudes to farming and objectives, as well as external farm factors that together influence the decision-making process \citep{Willock_1999}.