By Andrew Youn and Milindi Sibomana, One Acre Fund

Francoise Dusabimana lives in a modest home on a steep hillside in Rwanda, overlooking a valley dotted with maize fields. A single mother to two young daughters, she has just a quarter acre of land to support her family. Small harvests often leave her struggling to feed her children, and frequent landslides uproot her crops, sending them tumbling down the hillside. These landslides often lead to loss of fertile topsoil which reduces production potential for future seasons.

Everything changed when Francoise learned how to stabilize her land against soil displacement. By planting trees in combination with other soil management practices, she doubled her harvests and produced enough maize, beans, and vegetables to feed her family. “Now when I farm, I feel safe,” Francoise shares. “I know that every season I will harvest something and I’m not worried about landslides carrying my crops away.”

Francoise’s situation reflects a broader reality in Africa, where 65% of the continent’s farmland is degraded. Yet, her transformation demonstrates that it’s possible to restore the natural environment and mitigate climate change, while creating a pathway to prosperity for smallholder farmers. Scaling this model could mean significant progress towards the SDGs in Africa.

The critical role of smallholder farmers

Smallholder farmers are the backbone of African agriculture, managing 80% of the region’s farms and contributing up to 90% of food production in some countries. These farmers typically work with anything up to two hectares of land, growing staple crops such as maize, wheat, rice, cassava, and sorghum, and significantly shaping the environmental footprint of agricultural practices across the continent.

Despite their contribution to food and climate security, smallholder farmers operate in a deeply underfunded sector. Only four out of 51 African countries allocate the recommended 10% of public spending to agriculture. A lack of investment, coupled with a focus on short-term development solutions, has left large tracts of land degraded and unproductive. Meanwhile changing climate conditions make traditional farming areas less viable, leaving farmers to resort to shifting cultivation areas and clearing forests to meet their immediate needs. These changing land use patterns contribute to land degradation rates twice the global average, with 4 million hectares of forest lost each year.

As we grapple with how to protect the environment and feed a growing population, the prevailing narrative is that farming is in direct conflict with environmental sustainability.

However, an alternative model exists in which millions of farmers plant trees on their own land, decreasing pressure on biodiversity hotspots, creating a network of agrobiodiversity corridors between protected areas, and bringing a host of co-benefits to the farmers themselves.

Farmer-led landscape restoration at scale

This model, already implemented across multiple regions in sub-Saharan Africa, focuses on improving the productive capacity and market access of millions of smallholder farmers, and leverages the same strategies – such as last-mile distribution of agricultural inputs and on-site farmer advisory services – to support these farmers to achieve large-scale land restoration. It demonstrates that landscape restoration, food security, and rural economic development can go hand-in-hand.

Partnering with over 5,500 farmer-owned micro-nurseries in five countries, One Acre Fund supplies farmers with hardy tree seedlings that are well-suited for their specific soil, weather, and market conditions (some for purchase and others fully subsidized). As farmers plant trees alongside their staple crops, they not only contribute to landscape restoration but also see tangible improvements in their own crop yields and income. Trees provide shade and improve soil fertility through nitrogen fixation and erosion control, resulting in improvements in yield. The micro-nurseries become part of a coordinated yet decentralized rural supply chain that, when coupled with training for farmers on where and how to plant tree seedlings, can lead to USD 13 of farmer impact for every USD 1 spent and 100,000 hectares of land restored annually.

The impact from scaling this last-mile model – from 20 million seedlings in Rwanda to over 90 million seedlings planted annually in five countries – has resulted in an increase in tree survival rates and a reduction in the cost of seedlings. The network of micro-nurseries has invested in research and development of seedlings and can exercise collective purchasing power. Each year over 1,000 additional micro-nurseries join the network, now a viable career path for entrepreneurs in rural areas. Looking ahead, One Acre Fund has set an ambitious target of planting 1 billion trees and restoring 1 million hectares of land by 2030.

A self-fulfilling and scalable system for landscape restoration

The built-in incentives of this model are particularly appealing. Farmers derive direct personal advantages from their involvement. Increased agricultural productivity means more food on the table and greater economic stability, which in turn leads to farmers’ renewed investment in tree seedlings and responsible land management practices. Mature trees provide wood and fruit products that can be harvested and sold, generating an additional income stream. In this way, land restoration directly supports livelihoods, and vice versa.

This last-mile model is also demonstrably replicable. Scaling it across the continent will take landscape restoration in Africa beyond merely planting trees, instead offering a package of large-scale restoration interventions that provide both environmental and socioeconomic benefits and drive progress towards multiple SDGs. Our belief is that every smallholder should have access to free trees within 10 kilometers of where they live, via a farmer-owned and operated nursery network – providing highways of agrobiodiversity services in between pristine protected areas.

A call to the global community

Focusing on three key regions where two-thirds of Africa’s smallholder farmers live will move the needle the most. These are the Ethiopian highlands, the Lake Victoria basin (Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Malawi), and Nigeria. To accelerate the pace and scale of change, we must invest in bold and equitable ecological movements in lockstep with the farmers who steward the land we depend on.

The 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference (CBD COP 16) and the 2024 UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP 29) are critical moments for governments to assess progress on global biodiversity and climate goals. As smallholders continue to prove their contributions to African food and climate security, the global community must act at this moment to finance landscape restoration through scalable, turnkey models. Existing programs, such as the farmer-owned, micro-nursery network demonstrate how locally managed solutions can be scaled globally, ultimately complementing larger conservation and restoration efforts.