Desertification affects around 45 percent of Africa’s land. Regreening Africa is expected to bring 5 million hectares under restoration by 2030, boosting biodiversity and supporting local communities. Working across multiple countries assists in identifying successful and scalable local solutions, leveraging existing expertise and resources -including local knowledge - and ensuring interventions are appropriate to local contexts. 

The first core objective of Regreening Africa is to scale-up evergreen agriculture, using locally appropriate techniques including Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), tree planting and other forms of agroforestry and complementary sustainable land management interventions. 

The second core objective of the programme focuses on strategic decision making for scaling, which entails working across the eight countries to collect and apply evidence in multi-stakeholder engagement and policy processes. Through these engagement processes and technical advisory, we aim to equip eight countries with the surveillance and analytical tools for land degradation that support strategic decision-making and monitoring. 

Highlighted activities 

Since 2017, Regreening Africa has set its sights on the restoration of degraded drylands across eight countries. The highly ambitious programme set an inspirational example of large scale and impactful restoration by mobilizing local action and partnerships to reach 1 million hectares of land and 500 000 households to improve livelihoods and ecosystem services. Regreening Africa focused on a range of on-ground interventions, including the integration of trees on farms and various land uses and integrating complimentary soil and water conservation practices. Central to the regreening approach were community and civic engagement, partnerships, science, joint reflection and learning. 

The Regreening Africa flagship will target the mobilization of civil society stakeholder groups, specifically youth, and it will support the continued exploration of household data and geospatial data collected through citizen science via the Regreening App. In addition, it will support the strengthening of the FERM platform. The flagship aims to leverage targeted and catalytic support to enhance the long-term impact and learnings from local communities across regreening Africa restoration landscapes. 

Leading and partner organizations