The session shared Regreening Africa’s unique partnership approach and integration of research, practice, and policy to support land restoration. This innovative setting has proved successful in fighting land degradation, strengthening resilience to climate change and agroforestry value chains, and challenging poverty and food insecurity in the Sahel. It helps boost cooperation and cross-sectoral action, delivering integrated and digital solutions addressing some of the region’s most pressing challenges.
The session highlighted evidence on progress and lessons learnt related to matching practices to local contexts, the importance of monitoring and learning, policy engagement, youth and women inclusion and value chains. The second part of the session reflected on how the evidence and lessons from Regreening Africa, and other successful efforts can be inter-connected and applied to future restoration initiatives and investments such as the Great Green Wall.
Synopsis
Panellists summarised the successes of the Great Green Wall initiative and lessons learnt to date. Key lessons included the importance of empowering and incentivising local communities to ‘own’ restoration projects. Success rests on a combination of solutions matched to local contexts as well as the provision of tools to enable community-led land management. Initiatives such as this must address the drivers of degradation, ensure proper governance and funding, and set up robust monitoring and reporting processes to reliably measure progress. The importance of building diverse strategic partnerships and strengthening private sector investment was also underlined.
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