With the UN Climate Conference (COP27) and the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) just behind us, landscape restoration has once again been at the center of conversations about climate change mitigation and adaptation, agricultural productivity, and biodiversity promotion. 

Regreening Africa is a trailblazer in the context of landscape restoration on the African continent. In the last five years of operation, this research-in-development program has deployed contextual land and soil restoration techniques to promote restoration across eight countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The ultimate goal? To restore ecosystem functions, enhance biodiversity, and improve livelihoods across 500,000 households and a million hectares of land, while helping to mitigate the effects of climate change and enhance adaptation capacity.

As a large-scale, multi-country, multi-stakeholder restoration initiative, Regreening Africa offers a unique opportunity to generate actionable lessons on local, national, and global restoration efforts in Sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the insights and emerging issues observed in Kenya, Senegal, Rwanda, Ghana, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, and Somalia over the last half decade, as well as learnings from its cross-country webinars, Regreening Africa has released a series of Insight Briefs highlighting the value of partnerships and inclusivity in restoration efforts. These delve into subjects such as growing movements within the context of landscape restoration, gender, youth, and faith inclusion, as well as the essential role of pastoralism in regreening Africa.

About the briefs

Leveraging partnerships in land restoration

Because of the variety of systems, stakeholders, and expertise involved, collaboration is critical to any successful restoration process, and must be actively fostered. Regreening Africa’s partnership-based approach holds important lessons for large-scale, multi-country land restoration initiatives.

This brief shares key insights and learnings from the program's innovative partnership-based approach to increasing the scale and effectiveness of restoration interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa, including that:

• The research-in-development model, which brings together scientific and local knowledge to inform the development process, should be widely used to support evidence-based, reflexive, inclusive, and adaptive restoration interventions.
• National Oversight Coordination Committees (NOCCs) have been critical to the programme’s success, serving as a model for other land restoration initiatives.
• There are significant opportunities for cross-national learning to support land restoration – while acknowledging unique social, economic, political, and environmental contexts. As a multi-country initiative, Regreening Africa actively nurtures such learning opportunities.
• Joint monitoring, evidence-based reflection, evaluation, and learning foster trust among partners while increasing the effectiveness and sustainability of restoration efforts.

Youth in Regreening Africa

Africa has the youngest population of any continent, with almost 60 percent of the population under the age of 25 years and 77 percent under 35. If anyone should be spearheading landscape restoration in Africa to ensure sustainability, it's young people.

Regreening Africa has placed youth at the centre of its various programme activities, including nursery establishment and management, value chains, and collaborating with the #Trees4Goals initiative, to name but a few. Key insights from interventions that have boosted youth inclusion in continental restoration initiatives, providing opportunities to improve current and future livelihoods, include the following:

• Landscape restoration efforts that generate income offer young people sources of employment while rehabilitating degraded environments.
• Nurturing collaborations between young people and the State, as well as local, national, and international partners, is necessary for the successful ground-level execution of restoration projects.
• Policies that encourage youth participation in decision-making are essential for promoting effective youth participation.
• Youth have a strong interest in technology, and this can be leveraged to encourage them to learn more about landscape restoration.

Building a restoration movement

Movement building refers to the process of organising and influencing people to work towards an important collective vision or cause. With most of Sub-Sahara Africa’s land mass highly degraded, building a restoration movement is a crucial part of protecting and recovering our landscapes at scale.

According to insights gathered through Regreening Africa’s own activities and initiatives around landscape restoration, these are some of the ingredients for effective movement-building:

• Involve youth, women, and faith communities in restoration – this is essential for sustaining the growth of the movement.
• Use clear messages to articulate the objectives of the movement – this is imperative for the continuous mobilisation of people into the movement.
• Develop structures for mobilisation and organisation – these can be social media or existing social structures like churches, grassroots organisations, civil society organisations, business groups, friends, acquaintances, and family.
• Identify and align with political opportunities – these can be government restoration-related commitments at international, regional, and national levels, such as the AFR100 pledge.

Gender inclusion and agency in restoration

Integrating a gender-responsive approach is not just key to land restoration success; it also generates additional value by securing the livelihoods of all members of the community. The approach requires that all genders are considered and included in the solution – to build household resilience, both men and women must be actively engaged in household decision-making. It’s important to recognise and appreciate the different contributions each gender makes.

Regreening Africa aims to address and ensure more equitable engagement and benefits from restoration activities in the communities in which they operate. Here are some key insights from the gender-related activities they’ve carried out in the last five years:

• Women should be recognised as active decision-makers rather than passive recipients of restoration efforts.
• There’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach where gender is concerned – gender needs differ in the context of multicultural diversity and should be addressed accordingly.
• Enhancing women's inclusion and positioning them as agents of development is crucial for the success of land restoration, and advantageous for the entire community.
• Greater emphasis should be placed on implementing gender-transformational strategies at various scales – particularly at the village level, and across communities.

Engaging faith-based organisations in landscape restoration

Religion plays a hugely important role across Africa's societies and, for many millions of people, is a complex layering of sophisticated traditions and cosmologies with Islam or Christianity, which are the faiths of around 85% of the continent. As faith plays such a major role in shaping the worldview, and dominates the life choices, of the vast majority of rural communities, land users across many developing contexts in Africa are invariably part of strong, vibrant faith communities.

Faith-based approaches to land restoration build on the widespread understanding that humans are connected to the earth – and can only thrive if it thrives. Over the last five years, Regreening Africa has garnered vital insights on how to boost faith engagement in continental restoration efforts and create possibilities to improve current and future livelihoods:

• Because of their societal influence, faith-based institutions are often well-positioned to inspire individuals and communities to engage in land restoration.
• Although faith institutions and communities want to engage in land restoration, there is an inadequate understanding of how to do so most effectively, particularly in terms of capacity building.
• Faith-based institutions and communities, with their strong networks, are well-positioned to catalyse and strengthen relationships among the various stakeholders that can underpin land restoration.
• In terms of disposition and capacity to engage in land restoration, faith-based institutions and communities are extremely diverse.

The essential role of pastoralism in restoration

Animals play an essential role in African farming systems at almost all scales and biomes. Grazing and nomadic pastoralism have long been a part of African agricultural management and continue to be so today. They play an important role in dryland management: in the continent's savannahs, shrublands, and grasslands, where cropping is often impractical, nomadic pastoralism can produce highly nutritious foods while also preserving and restoring landscapes and providing habitat for a diverse range of wildlife.

While the restoration of African agricultural landscapes is frequently thought to be entirely dependent on farmers' cropping methods, livestock should not be overlooked. Here are some key insights from the brief:

• Grasslands and rangelands cover up to 28 percent of the planet's land area and are one of the world's largest carbon sinks. Their mismanagement has serious negative consequences for the climate and their inhabitants – human and nonhuman alike.
• The benefits of traditional nomadic pastoralism can be replicated at a ranch level by adapting management systems such as Adaptive MultiPaddock Grazing. In both cases, the key is to force the animals to graze all palatable species (not just their favourite ones), and to bunch them at a high enough density for their hooves to break the soil’s crust, push down grass seeds, and trample unpalatable species into a mulch. Removing the animals before palatable plants are grazed too much, and then letting the land rest to allow grazed areas to regrow and new grass plants to sprout from pushed-down seeds before letting the animals back on, completes the cycle.
• Modern science has proven that these management systems, which the inhabitants of grassland biomes have pragmatically evolved over millennia, apply these principles and are the most effective. Nomadic pastoralism, for example, effectively mimics the soil-building, biodiversity-enhancing processes that created the world's wildlife-rich grasslands, where herd-bunching and migration to fresh grass was a service provided by carnivores.
• Mismanagement of grasslands is caused by a poor understanding of grassland ecology in dryland areas. For example, set-stocking – in which a low number of animals are left on the same paddock for weeks on end – degrades soils rapidly (the palatable species are overgrazed and the toxic ones are fertilised by manure), but is still enabled by policies that encourage pastoralists to settle down on ranches without appropriate management advice.

In sum…

None of Regreening Africa’s achievements, or the insights gained from them, would be possible without partnerships and collaborations between the programme and its various stakeholders – from donors and scientists to communities and farmers. The project’s insight reports invariably show the power of working collectively to achieve land restoration objectives.

About Regreening Africa

Regreening Africa was launched by the European Union in 2017 as a large pilot to test how to overcome the challenge of land degradation at scale. This ambitious research-in-development project is managed by World Agroforestry in collaboration with implementation partners and the communities with which it works. It makes use of a variety of land and soil restoration techniques that encourage the growth of trees in croplands, communal areas, and – where appropriate – pastoral areas, to restore ecosystem functions and thereby livelihoods. By end of the first phase in 2023, Regreening Africa aims to have reversed land degradation on one million hectares across eight countries in Sub-Sahara Africa: Kenya, Senegal, Rwanda, Ghana, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, and Somalia.