As agroecology has increasingly been brought into the international dialogue on the future of food and agriculture, there have been calls for building the evidence base of its performance across the multiple dimensions of sustainability and its capacity to achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals. In response to this need, FAO coordinated the participatory development of the Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE), whose general objective is to produce consolidated evidence on the extent and contextual use of agroecological practices and the performance of agroecological systems globally.

TAPE is an innovative and holistic framework and process that can support projects (among other uses) to include an agroecological approach to ensure that transformational contextualized practices for regenerated landscapes and sustainable livelihoods are developed and spread throughout targeted areas. TAPE has already been tested in more than 30 countries by different actors for different purposes and has recently been used to support the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)’s Regeneration of Landscapes and Livelihoods (ROLL) project development in Lesotho.

In this document, the results of the implementation of TAPE in Lesotho for the baseline assessment of the ROLL project are presented. The framework was implemented in 200 production systems across 4 agroecological zones, 5 districts and 19 distinct landscapes. The use of TAPE in these territories provided important data and key information about the overall sustainability of farms measured by different indicators of performance. It also provided insights on how the level of agroecological transition measured with the 10 Elements of Agroecology links with the multidimensional performance of the evaluated systems.