The United Nations General Assembly declared 2021 to 2030 as the decade of ‘ecosystem restoration’, signalling a global consensus on the urgency to restore degraded lands. Restoring degraded lands is critical to regain lost ecological functionality that underpins life-sustaining ecosystem services, such as the provision of food, fresh water, and fibre, and the regulation of climate, natural disasters, and pests. Indeed, restoration is fundamental for meeting the triple goals of tackling the climate crisis, reversing biodiversity loss, and improving human wellbeing. Regreening Africa (2017 to 2022) is part of a larger global and regional effort to reverse and halt land degradation, which is being implemented in eight African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, and Somalia.

It is funded by the European Union and implemented by World Agroforestry (ICRAF), in partnership with five international non-governmental organizations (NGOs): World Vision, Oxfam, Care International, Catholic Relief Services, and Sahel Eco. It seeks to (a) directly reverse land degradation among 500,000 households across one million hectares of agricultural land in the eight sub-Saharan African countries; and (b) catalyze a much larger scaling effort to restore tens of millions of hectares of degraded land across the continent.