ID: 1655

Regreening Africa

Reversing Land Degradation by Scaling-up Evergreen Agriculture (Regreening Africa) is part of larger global and regional efforts to halt and reverse land degradation. It is contributing to the achievement of the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) targets and is aligned with other regional programmes, such as the Great Green Wall Initiative. This flagship builds on the experience gained by a European Union funded project called Regreening Africa, whose goal is to improve smallholder livelihoods, food security, and resilience to climate change in 8 African countries by restoring ecosystem services. It seeks to reverse land degradation over at least one million hectares and benefit 500,000 farm households, while also catalyzing an even larger scaling effort to restore tens of millions of hectares of degraded land across Africa. Regreening Africa focuses on the incorporation of trees into many land-use types, including croplands, communal lands and pastoral areas, with complementary soil and water conservation and soil improvement practices. It leverages concurrent social inclusion and livelihood-enhancing efforts and creates an enabling policy environment for land restoration at national and sub-national levels. It is a vibrant and impactful science-practice-policy initiative. Regreening Africa is not a top-down effort delivering pre-baked ‘solutions’ to its beneficiaries. Rather, it promotes transformative change by supporting people in their efforts to restore their landscapes to secure benefits for current and future generations. It is a unique effort to systematically use structured learning processes, underpinned by scientific research, to inform an adaptive, iterative system that delivers better development outcomes. Regreening Africa is currently funded by the European Union and is being implemented in its initial phase over 2017-2022 by a consortium of international non-governmental organisations, led by World Agroforestry and including World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere and Oxfam, as well as national NGO Sahel Eco. It is active in eight countries: in East Africa, these are Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and the Somaliland and Puntland regions of Somalia; and in West Africa, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Senegal, with a light touch in Burkina Faso. Regreening Africa works locally with smallholder farmers through lead farmers, farmer groups, community-based organisations, extension staff and local government to provide technical support. At a sub-national and national scale, the programme works with a range of stakeholders to share lessons and technical support as well as to create an enabling policy and institutional environment. Regreening Africa seeks to boost the impact of the invested resources as much as possible by delivering a range of livelihood, social, gender, and ecosystem benefits and combines three complementary perspectives: policy, implementation and research. Regreening Africa’s specific objectives are: 1. To strengthen Please give a brief description of your flagship, its primary activities and how they relate to restoration (up to 4000 characters, including space). * 31. national abilities to assess the costs of land degradation and the economic benefits of investment in Sustainable Land Management; 2. To equip countries and stakeholders with surveillance and analytic tools on land degradation dynamics, including their social and economic dimensions, to support strategic decision-making and the monitoring of treebased restoration scaling-up efforts. 3. To help countries accelerate the scaling-up of treebased and complementary restoration practices by smallholder farmers and pastoralists, fueled through the development of associated value chains. Regreening Africa is one of the few large-scale, multi-country, multi-stakeholder restoration programmes whose implementation and track-record has been proven prior to the launch of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. As such, it offers a unique opportunity to generate actionable lessons for many restoration efforts

Planned actions

Management of land/water

Education or awareness-raising

Protection of land/water