Overall goal

The goal of the project is to reduce food insecurity and improve livelihoods of poor people living in African drylands by restoring degraded land, and returning it to effective and sustainable tree, crop and livestock production, thereby increasing land profitability and landscape and livelihood resilience.

Approach and methodology

The project is designed to operate through bringing key partners from the public and private sectors, across research, extension, market, and governance institutions to work together in an iterative co-learning cycle, where options are tested against context and lessons learnt are fed back into the cycle.

This requires capacity strengthening within these key institutions and locally, nationally and regionally to facilitate interaction amongst them. The capacity strengthening is achieved by doing (the co-learning cycle is a capacity strengthening strategy that is propelled by the learning achieved through using planned comparison of options by context, rather than only trying best bets over narrow ranges of context). The approach will create durable communities of practice able to better use resources to make impact on land restoration at scale.

Communities of Practice

The Communities of Practice on the restoration of degraded lands aims to foster relationships, develop learning situated in practice, create and share new knowledge to restore degraded land, returning it to effective and sustainable tree, crop and livestock production; thereby increasing land profitability and landscape and livelihood resilience.

The formation of Communities of Practice will enable the implementation of action research in a co-learning cycle. We will implement nested Communities of Practice each with their own platforms tailored to the specific contexts (Figure 1).

Video: Farmers of Mwingi