Presented by Peter Gubbels, Director Action Learning and Advocacy (Groundswell International) & Senior Fellow Global Evergreening Alliance. During Groundswell International: Restoring Sahelian Drylands: Practice, evidence, lessons and scaling session of GLF Africa

1. Restoring African Drylands
Scaling: what insights from practice?
How can civil society organizations
be mobilized to scale out regreening?
Lessons and principles from
Groundswell experience in West
Africa drylands
Peter Gubbels
Director Action Learning and Advocacy &
Senior Fellow
Global Evergreening Alliance

2. What does Scaling of Evergreening involve?
Scaling of evergreening has three dimensions:
 horizontal (outscaling);
 vertical (upscaling) to address obstacles and to
create a favorable enabling policy environment, and
 deepening (or intensification) of the evergreening
practices to regenerate a farming and landscape
system.
Horizontal scaling
• is a technical and social process that leads ever-
greater numbers of rural households and
communities to adapt and applying evergreening
practices,
• in sequential and progressive manner, in their
specific landscape context,
• reaching a critical mass of social mobilization
• whereby the process becomes largely self
spreading.

3. Vertical scaling involves an institutional uptake of
evergreening (e.g., by local government, supportive
value chains in the markets, in national environmental
and tree ownership policies, and research programs, and
by relevant agricultural and environmental actors).
Deepening scaling involves
• intensification of evergreening practices at the
landscape level to successfully stop degradation
and begin to restore the agro-ecological system in a
given territory.
• optimizing the synergies by a sequential and
progressive uptake of often complementary
evergreening practices i.e., developing the value
chain of non timber forest products
• providing benefits for women or youth, or
• complementary soil and water conservation
practices.
Effective scaling of evergreening requires building
bridges between these 3 dimensions; linking technical,
political/institutional and social factors
Glyricidia seedlings, Mali

4. The urgent need to scale Evergreening for Ecosystem Restoration
 Evidence is mounting of the role of
evergreening in addressing land,
ecosystem, food and climate crises
 Efforts to scale up evergreening/land
restoration have not yet reached the
urgently needed breadth and depth
across different levels to achieve Bonn
Challenge
 Much is still to be learned about how
to quickly and effectively take
evergreening to scale for:
1. Food and nutrition security
2. Adaptation and mitigation of
climate change
3. Sustainable land management

5. Issues in scaling evergreening
 Transition: Evergreening involves a progressive
intensification of practices and building on
synergies to transform a social /agricultural-
livestock /landscape system
 To transform the farming system and landscaope
must also address the connected social-cultural
relations and institutions in a particular territory.
 Because it highly knowledge intensive, and is
shaped by local opportunities, and ecosystems,
regreening is highly context-specific
 What works in one territory/landscape may not be
very useful elsewhere
 Most farmers/herders do not adopt many
different regreening practices at once.
 ISSUE: Scaling regreening is often focused on
technical spreading one or two highly productive
practices only…

6. Aside from regreening practices, what else
needs to be scaled?
Social, cultural and institutional issues as:
 women’s empowerment (decision-making, access
to land, tools, seeds, credit)
 Equity: needs of marginalized groups and
households
 diversity of diets, local value chains and markets
 the quality of local governance (community,
municipal)
 community leadership and organizational
capacity (mobilizing resources, taking collective
action, adapting and spreading innovations)
Scaling evergreening requires a progressive, but also integrated approach addressing both the technical, social
and institutional/policy dimensions

7. STRATEGY 1: FOLLOW A PROGRESSIVE PROCESS
 Participatory diagnosis/landscape mapping
 Identify existing solutions/regreening practices
 Promote only 2 or 3 evergreening practices from a “menu”
 Choose practices that will provide quick and tangible results to
real problems perceived by communities
 Foster farmers/herders learning from peers via field visits
 Organize practical “hands-on” training in selected communities
 Decentralize the sessions, so that the locations can be reached by
everyone, particularly women
 Early success will often motivate farmers to a step further;
towards a transition using a more complex set of agroecological
practices.
 Promote a “second” and then third wave of innovations
 Seek out the sequence and combination of changes for synergies
Start to integrate related issues of equity, women, nutrition, governance

8. STRATEGY 2: ENSURE EQUITY IN THE SCALING PROCESS
 Ensure the active participation and engagement of the most
vulnerable families, and women
 Address complex, culturally sensitive issues related to equity
and gender/women’s empowerment and youth
 Engage the broader community in a dialogue and develop
intentional strategies for equity
 Build on local social-cultural values of solidarity and mutual
support. Such discussion helps to diffuse jealousy and
misunderstanding.
 Develop specialized and tailored specialized support for
women because of their role the family economy
 Foster active self-organized women’s groups (e.g., on issues
related to access to land, seeds, water, knowledge, or credit)
is a vital factor of success for the scaling process
 Develop income generating activities from regreening
ensuring youth and women benefit.
Equity requires giving attention to ethnic and clan
differences and youth within communities, and the
relationships between farmers and pastoralists

9. STRATEGY 3: TRANSFORM GOVERNANCE AND ENABLE
COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT TO LEAD
 The agency of village-based organizations and
community leaders must be at the heart of scaling
 Enhancing local leadership and capacity is vital for
progressive spreading
 Primary role of local government is to facilitate
conditions that allow communities to decide
priorities, select solutions, take collective action
 Role of outside actors (such as NGOs, technical
assistance agencies, research) is to support this
process of communities managing their actions.
 Quality of the engagement of officials and
technicians with communities increases when they
have opportunities to visit fields and talk directly
with community members (caravans)
 Scaling is more rapid when all actors share a similar
vision and understanding of evergreening
Strengthening Local Governance for
Resilience: Partial view of CARAVAN to influence
Regional, Provincial and municipal decision makers
(Burkina Faso). Caravans can help change perceptions of
government agencies of their roles, and the way they should work
with rural people.

10. Taking evergreening innovations to scale is not feasible unless
communities mobilize themselves and fully engage
Farmer to farmer/community to community: learning and spread of regreening practices
strengthen capacities of communities to lead and manage programs

11. Eight phases in a process to scale Evergreening
PHASE 1: Define the causes and solutions for land degradation
 Use a participatory diagnosis process to define, together with
communities, the primary causes of chronic vulnerability.
 Use findings to help communities identify, select their preferred
new practices that offer solutions
PHASE 2: Identify ‘easy’ practices that quickly generate results
 Let communities prioritize a limited number of relatively
easy, low-cost, and relevant regreeninogy innovations.
PHASE 3: Organize villages within a landscape zone
 identify all major villages/communities
 group into clusters (based on market or other linkages)
 identify a dynamic « sentinel village » within each cluster
 focus initial support in this sentinel village
 regularly invite delegates from other communities in the
cluster to observe, learn and engage
Sentinel
community
Target
Community
Admin/Landscape
area
Cluster of
communities
Leverage experience and leaders in sentinel villages to spread
regreening to other interested communities within the cluster

12. Phases for scaling out regreening
PHASE 4: Learning visits.
 Within each cluster, the sentinel communities serve as a
learning center for the other communities in the cluster.
 Bring influential leaders from neighboring communities to the
sentinel village to see practical, successful evergreening
practices
PHASE 5: Farmer/Pastoralist volunteers training their peers
 Build a group of ‘volunteer trainers.’ in each village, both men
and women
 Ensure that each major neighborhood in the communities
reached have at least 2 respected and credible trainers
 Encourage each of these volunteers to train four or five
neighbors.
 Generate a rapid local multiplier effect across the entire
community

13. Phases for scaling (continued)
PHASE 6: Integrate more complicated
practices and social issues.
 After the first wave of initial innovations start
spreading interest and motivation, initiate the
second wave
 Start dialogue to undertake additional activities to
address equity, women’s empowerment and
nutrition
PHASE 7: Strengthen governance.
 Strengthen governance capacities of local
community leaders /local government
 Foster the emergence of community based
structures with responsibility to oversee, lead,
manage, and sustain this process for scaling
independently
 Work with local government councils and elected
officials to raise awareness, integrate agroecology
into local development plans and budgets

14. Phases in scaling out (continued)
PHASE 8: Reach out, communicate and advocate.
 Use the media, especially (rural) radio Increase the
network of farmer/pastoralist trainers
 Organize competitions and cultural activities within
the area.
 Seek out and connect to networks of social actors
engaged in supporting agroecology:
farmer/pastoralist organizations and rural women’s
associations
 Create sufficient momentum to persuade enough
actors (i.e., local governments) to shift their ways
of working to support regreening.
 Use caravans to take political actors and journalists
on learning visits to successful sites.
 Demonstrate the success of regreening to local
governments and beyond

15. Phase 8 Advocacy (continued)
 Build support by small scale
farmers/pastoralists through education and
awareness raising on causes and solutions of
land degradation
 Educate the media: take them to visit
communities and interview farmers
 Conduct mass farmer/pastoralist -led
campaigns in the streets of urban centers and to
parliament
 Media engagement: debates by social
movement leaders and activists and policy
makers on national television and radio.
 Produce and broadcast video documentaries
on regreening
 Organize caravans for policy makers and
farmers

16. Phase 8 Advocacy/Outreach, continued
 Map all evergreening hotspots and
experiences across the country
 Networking: convene and organize regional
and national workshops and conferences with
interested civil society organizations to
coordinate, and learn from each other
 Policy Analysis: Determine what policies and
programs work against evergreening, and
what supports evergreening (tree ownership,
environmental regulations etc.)
 Movement building: Convene actors to
collectively determine policy
recommendations. Plan national campaigns to
influence government