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The Resilient Food Systems (RFS) programme is one of three Integrated Approach Pilot programmes financed by GEF during the Sixth Replenishment Cycle (GEF-6). It aims to improve the resilience and sustainability of smallholder agricultural systems while generating global environmental benefits. Despite challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, RFS has continued to progress with advancing integrated solutions in smallholder agriculture across dryland regions in, among other African countries, Burundi, Malawi and Uganda. 

As part of this programme, a wide range of activities has been implemented since 2016. For example, a project in Burundi has been planting bamboo seedlings along riverbanks, which not only leads to riverbank stabilization, but also improves water quality by decreasing sedimentation. Activities in Burundi, Malawi and Tanzania have shown that community participation in identifying and prioritising project interventions helps create a collective vision for the future at landscape level and beyond, ensuring the sustainability of project outcomes and contributing to the scaling up of successful interventions. In a handful of countries including Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, beekeeping has been promoted as an alternative income-generating activity. Not only can income be generated through the sale of honey and beeswax, but bees additionally play an essential role in the surrounding agricultural systems. Some countries, including Burundi and Tanzania, have also successfully organized farmer field schools (FFS) aimed at identifying locally adapted sustainable land and water management practices in relation to topics such as sustainable rangeland management, tree nurseries and water harvesting. 

What is more, a wide range of monitoring expertise has been made available to country projects through the programme’s Regional Hub. In collaboration with the Regional Hub, workshops and technical sessions have provided platforms for collaboration on tested approaches, methodologies and tools for monitoring different dimensions of agroecosystem and human resilience and well-being. By providing a wide range of tools for M&E processes without prescribing any RFS accommodates different local contexts, needs and challenges. 

In fact, some countries are getting particularly creative in their M&E and knowledge sharing strategy in the current COVID-19 pandemic by branching out into participatory video approaches as part of the Making every voice count for adaptive management (MEV-CAM) initiative. Following the success of MEV-CAM’s film-based methods for on-the-ground monitoring and communication in the context of the Drylands Sustainable Landscapes Impact Programme (DSL-IP) from the Seventh Replenishment Cycle (GEF-7), RFS project partners from Burundi, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda have decided to join the initiative and embark on their own participatory video story. 

More specifically, MEV-CAM aims to provide a participatory and consultative approach to ensure that communities and stakeholders at the landscape, national and district or local levels have an opportunity to provide information and input into their participatory video storyboard. The result will be a participatory video which documents the project successes and the enabling policy environment that led to those success at different levels, and which likewise highlights the key successes, goals and challenges from the community’s vantage point. 

To kick-start this process, some GEF-6 stakeholders in the four countries have already highlighted key lessons the programme has provided to them, including at which level said lessons manifested themselves, which outcomes were achieved, and the challenges that still need to be addressed in relation to these lessons. 

The first step towards choosing which story to tell through participatory videos has thus been taken by the four countries. But this is just the “trailer”, so stay tuned for more.