Restored grazing enclosure, Borana zone, Oromia region, Ethiopia

Many approaches to the restoration of degraded drylands have been successful in Ethiopia. However, despite these and other success stories, scaling-up land restoration approaches (or ‘options’) often proves challenging. Options which have been successful in one area may fail in others. There is little information on areas where a successful option could succeed, versus where the same option may fail. Consequently, it is often challenging to scale out even the most successful land restoration approaches.

Officially launched in 2015, across four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa—Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, and Niger—this three-year project, ‘Restoration of Degraded Lands for Food Security and Poverty Reduction in East Africa and the Sahel: Taking successes in land restoration to scale’, combines local and expert knowledge to identify factors controlling the success of land restoration under differing local conditions, and tailors land restoration practices to these local circumstances.

In Ethiopia, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and its partners—the government, the national agricultural research system, non-governmental organizations and CGIAR centres—are developing and testing a more systematic scientific approach to guide effective scaling of successful dryland restoration approaches. In seeking to take successful dryland restoration efforts to scale in Ethiopia, the project will apply the resulting data and assessments, creating tools to target restoration approaches already proven in Ethiopia in new areas where they are likely to succeed.

For more information on this project, see http://hdl.handle.net/10568/73299