Study looks for success factors in African projects that heal land and help people

Argan oil cooperatives in Morocco. Regreening Niger. Revitalizing a national park in Madagascar. Wildlife conservancies in Namibia. Cashew plantations in Burkina Faso. Beach management in Kenya. Agroforestry in Ghana.

These are but a smattering of the many initiatives that have tried to reverse land degradation in Africa while improving people’s lives. Some succeeded, others failed, and as a recent study finds, the outcomes are devilishly difficult to predict.

Nearly half of Africa is affected by desertification, and two-thirds of productive land is degraded, according to a 2021 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); yet, 60% of people in Africa depend on their land and forests.

“I do a lot of projects where I go to the communities, and I work with people to change things, and to imagine how we could improve things,” says Camille Jahel, a researcher at the French Agricultural Centre for International Development (CIRAD). “At one point we wanted to know, but is it possible? Is it even possible to have a sustainable change?”

To be clear, this is not an entirely new question. But Jahel says that while there’s a trove of theoretical work, few studies have looked at on-the-ground projects in Africa and holistically considered the complex combination of local dynamics, market forces and ecological constraints, often in countries fraught with a long colonial history and little cash.

“Local context is undoubtedly very important, but, if we are to learn going forward, we need to generalize, somehow,” says Eric Lambin, a geography professor at Stanford University in the U.S.

To try to figure out why some initiatives work and others fail, Jahel and Lambin combed the literature for well-documented interventions that had sought to improve both environmental sustainability and livelihoods. They settled on 17 initiatives in 13 countries, ranging from beach management in Kenya to the Great Green Wall in Senegal. Working from published papers and conversations with researchers, they scored each project on various criteria. Then they sifted through the data to try to tease out the factors that influenced the outcomes.

“We were curious, and we didn’t have any clue what we would find,” Jahel says.

Positive change is possible

The recent study, published by Jahel and Lambin in Sustainability Science, found that seven out of the 17 initiatives achieved sizable ecological, economic and social improvements, indicating there could be a synergy between the three aims.

Some initiatives, which were implemented nationally or across a broad region, saw improvements in some places but not others, and a few projects didn’t lead to any improvements at all.

Generally, improvements in ecological conditions were the most impressive; economic improvements in terms of income or crop yields were often comparatively modest.

The study authors identified a long list of contributing factors that fit broadly under communication, motivation and capacity. The list included things like: identifying the causes of environmental decline; communication with policymakers; alignment with institutional structures; financial incentives; and many more.

Predictably, no one single factor determined an initiative’s success or failure.

“You have to really think about a system of many pieces that have to come together,” Lambin says.

Of these successes, the case study from Niger stood out, Jahel says. Contrary to her expectations, it was one of the few “bottom-up” approaches, and exemplified the importance of communication and strong social relationships.

In the early 1980s, much of southern Niger was a dry, windswept plain. Farms had replaced woodlands, trees were cut for firewood, and droughts had left the land parched. In Maradi district, members of the Maradi Integrated Development Project (MIDP) developed a reforestation approach called farmer-managed natural regeneration. Instead of planting exotic species, they encouraged farmers to protect the bushes and shoots that popped up in their fields, so that the trees would come back on their own.

At first, the uptake was slow. But during the 1984 and 1988 droughts, the MIDP offered farmers food in exchange for protecting the emerging seedlings, in a food-for-work program. When the rains returned, most farmers went back to their old ways. But about a quarter of the farmers stuck with the program. As their trees grew, they began reaping the rewards: healthier soils, higher crop yields, mulch and firewood close at hand.

News spread, and, aided by ongoing workshops, more farmers began nurturing seedlings on their farms. They also began coming together and working with herders to restrict grazing, in order to implement regeneration across the wider landscape. That entailed building on existing institutions while including new voices in decision-making. Support from NGOs and changes in laws around tree ownership also helped the initiative sustain momentum.

“When you read the story, you see that there was a lot of work to communicate … they had to organize themselves, to make arrangements with herders,” Jahel says. So far, farmer-managed natural regeneration has been used to reforest at least 6 million hectares (15 million acres) in Niger, or about 5% of the country’s total area. “So it was really a big movement with a lot of types of actions taken by farmers and local NGO at the beginning, and that had impressive results.”

Context is key 

In other initiatives, local context made a real difference, perhaps best exemplified by conservancies in Namibia.

Communal conservancies in Namibia offer a formal and legally recognized structure through which communities can manage and benefit from wildlife on their land. The first conservancies were gazetted in 1998; as of 2022, there were 86 conservancies covering a fifth of Namibia, with 78% generating income for their members.

Maximilian Meyer, now a postdoctoral research fellow at Agroscope in Switzerland, studied conservancies in Namibia’s Zambezi region for his Ph.D. He found that, overall, conservancies in the region achieved the twin goals of wildlife conservation and socioeconomic development.

Elephant populations were stable or increasing, and woodlands inside the conservancies were healthier than in the surrounding areas, with the most intact woodlands found closer to tourist lodges.

Most of the direct economic benefits came from benefit-sharing agreements with tourist companies, which typically operate a lodge on a portion of the conservancy’s land. Communities also benefited from a share of the meat from animals shot by trophy hunters. Meyer’s research also showed that people in conservancies also had higher “environmental incomes,” with greater access to firewood, wild foods, thatching grass and more, especially closer to lodges.

But other research, which Jahel and Lambin examined in their study, found that conservancies far from main roads failed to attract tourists, so didn’t generate as much income. And in wetter regions, agriculture was more profitable than tourism, giving fewer incentives to conserve wildlife that might damage crops.

“It’s really contextual,” Jahel says. “You have a good idea, and after that you have to find a place where this idea can really work.”

Meyer points out that conservancies offer social justice advantages in terms of returning land that was taken away during colonialism, an outcome which can’t really be measured.

“It’s a way of getting land back, which is super important,” Meyer says.

Change is risky

For many rural farmers, change is risky, especially if they live close to the poverty line.

“When we want change, we need to find something that motivates people,” Jahel says. “Incentives are really the most important.”

Often those incentives are financial, as was the case for a cashew nut initiative in southern Burkina Faso.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the government of Burkina Faso established a handful of cashew plantations to combat growing desertification in the region and create income for communities, but there was little uptake.

That changed in the mid-’90s. With a boom in cashew prices, buyers in India flocked to West Africa. In countries like Côte d’Ivoire, where Burkinabé migrants worked, cashew was soon established as a major crop. Some of these migrants returned home to Burkina Faso and began establishing cashew plantations in the south, where there was adequate rainfall.

Interest in the new crop then spread, from the newly established farms and from the government plantations, says Sarah Audouin, now a scientist at CIRAD, who studied the dynamics of cashew plantations in Burkina Faso for her Ph.D. Relationships between farmers, infrastructure and timely support from NGOs and government all influenced where and how fast cashew farming spread.

But not everyone benefited equally, Audouin says. In some cases herders lost access to land where they’d previously grazed their livestock, and migrants who didn’t have land tenure also didn’t receive the full benefits from the trees they planted.

“You have winners and losers, especially when this is about using [limited] natural resources,” Audouin says.

And, although initially introduced to stop land degradation, some worry that cashew cultivation in parts of West Africa is now driving deforestation, replacing food crops and leading to lower levels of biodiversity.

Change takes time

The study also highlighted the need to maintain momentum, and reconcile the short-term needs of communities with longer-term objectives like ecosystem restoration. In some initiatives, donors withdrew support too soon, or the project only implemented short-term incentives, meaning the initiative floundered before longer-term goals could be met.

Jahel says projects also sometimes fail because they’re too narrowly focused.

“Sometimes you have projects that are, for example, technology-centered, and they won’t try to look at the conflict between people … and so they will play on only one lever and they forget the others, and that’s why [they] sometimes fail,” she says.

Lambin says it’s crucial to take a systems approach, to adapt as things crop up or the project enters a new phase.

“You do three steps forward and two backwards,” Lambin says. “There will be a crisis, there will be a change in regime, there will be a drought, there will be a conflict. So always managing this dynamic evolution and keeping all these variables juggling. It’s almost daunting. You almost think, ‘We’ll never get it.’ But you know, interestingly, 40% of our cases did.”

Citations:

Jahel, C., & Lambin, E. F. (2024). Reversing degradation of social-ecological systems: Explaining the outcomes of interventions in Africa. Sustainability Science, 1-30. doi:10.1007/s11625-024-01568-5

Banner image of cheetahs by Mark Dumont via Wikimedia Commons (CC 2.0).

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