Tag: capacity building

Forest and landscapes Restoration: Voices from the Communities

This collection of farmer stories explores how women, men, and youth in Makueni and Taita Taveta Counties are engaging in forest and landscape restoration whose outcomes were supported by the Delivering nature-based solution outcomes by addressing policy, institutional and monitoring gaps in forest and landscape restoration project which was funded by UK PACT (Partnering for Accelerated Climate Transitions) and implemented by CIFOR-ICRAF in partnership with the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations-Kenya (FAO), and implemented in Makueni and Taita Taveta Counties. The project addressed key policy, institutional, and monitoring gaps in restoration while promoting gender-transformative and socially inclusive approaches. By strengthening community forest associations (CFAs), building local capacity, and supporting evidence-based decision-making, it contributed to more resilient landscapes, improved livelihoods, and Kenya’s climate and restoration commitments.

The stories highlight personal experiences, drawing from project activities such as community dialogues about how gender roles shape access to resources, decision making, and participation in restoration, as well as trainings and household “vision journey” exercises. These approaches have helped break down barriers, strengthen mutual understanding, and promote more inclusive and equitable participation in restoration. The stories show how training and inclusive practices are influencing household dynamics, encouraging women and men to make decisions as partners, strengthening community forest associations, and shaping local livelihoods, offering insight into the practical and social changes that support more equitable and sustainable land management.

  1. Damaris Kayalo (English)
  2. Purity Musyoka and John Muteti (English)
  3. Bosco Mwendo and Catherine Muia (English)
  4. Leonard and Catherine Kalenga (English)
  5. Domiana Muteti and Joseph Wambua (English)
  6. Elizabeth Mbinga (English)
  7. Elizabeth Mbinga (Swahili)
  8. Christopher Mwamburi (English)
  9. Jenliza Raphael and Kwaze (English)
  10. Frederick Mjomba (English)
  11. Frederick Mjomba (Swahili)
  12. Mentors CBO (English)
  13. Mentors CBO (Swahili)
  14. Green Valley Youth Group (English)
  15. Green Valley Youth Group (Swahili)

Designing blended learning courses for landscape professionals

This manual builds on the experiences of CIFOR-ICRAF and the Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation, which is part of Wageningen University &
Research.
Over the years, CIFOR-ICRAF and WCDI has been designing and developing courses for landscape professionals, including in-person, online, and blended courses. It particularly draws on the experiences of courses on Landscape Governance, Managing Risk in the Face of Climate Change and Climate Action for Food Systems Transformation, and the Professional Certificate Programme on Sustainable and Inclusive Landscapes.
We are excited to share our experience and insights, and encourage you to use this toolkit to take professional landscape learning to the next level.

Community dialogues, A powerful tool to facilitate open and constructive discussions about gender roles and norms

Community dialogues are participatory tools designed to spark open discussions about gender roles, norms, and inclusion in land restoration. They help participants reflect on how social expectations create barriers or opportunities for engagement with natural resources, and explore ways to make restoration more equitable. These activities not only address gender but also broader inclusion issues, such as youth and people with disabilities (PWDs), ensuring all community members can contribute to and benefit from forest and landscape restoration.

Foundations of a learning system for food system transformation under uncertainty

Despite a broad consensus on the necessity of fundamental change, endeavors to transform food systems appear to have reached an impasse. Greater engagement with the uncertainty of food systems could open up new ways of triggering transformation directed towards achieving more sustainable and inclusive outcomes. As a way of reorienting current food system change efforts to better embrace uncertainty, we propose a framework for a transformative learning system that serves two aims. First, the framework highlights the importance of locally led action, experimentation, and learning, providing a way of focusing on the core capacities and skills needed to act in the face of uncertainty. Second, it outlines the different types of learning functions that need to operate at different scales of food systems to trigger disruptive, coordinated, and more democratic change processes. The operationalization of this framework necessitates shifts in roles and ways of working across the landscape of food system interventions. The discussion will address the who and how of this potential change, as well as its subsequent impact on the operational modalities of individuals, the process of change itself, and the structures and institutions involved in the process. We argue that embracing uncertainty and the focus on learning has the potential to facilitate a more agile and locally relevant change process. This would allow actors to learn from decentrally pursued food systems reforms, leading to the emergence of diverse pathways that complement on-going efforts and potentially accelerate transformation efforts.

Restoration Education: Building a Pan-African curriculum on landscape restoration

The Restoration Education program aims to integrate landscape restoration into academic and vocational education systems in Africa. The initiative builds on the international momentum created by the launch of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030): it led to increased investments and a greater number of restoration projects across Africa and, in so doing, brought to the fore the need for adequately trained professionals. Unlike forest management, landscape restoration has yet to be fully integrated into higher-education curricula across Africa. To build a new generation of landscape restoration professionals, CIFOR-ICRAF teamed up with African universities. With the support of CIFOR-ICRAF’s Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) and the International Union of Forestry Research Organisations (IUFRO, we launched a Call to Action to develop an inter- and transdisciplinary restoration curriculum integrating knowledge from the biophysical and social sciences.

Training Manual on Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA)

Rwanda’s agriculture sector is the largest contributor to national greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 45.6% of the total, while the majority of the population depends on subsistence farming on increasingly degraded land. Climate change impacts—such as rising temperatures, erratic rainfall and prolonged droughts—pose growing risks, particularly in the eastern and southeastern regions. In response, the Government of Rwanda and its partners have prioritized climate-smart agriculture (CSA) as a pathway to enhance climate resilience, reduce emissions, and support sustainable development in line with the Paris Agreement. This manual aims to strengthen the capacity of extension agents and farmers by promoting CSA practices that integrate climate-resilient crop and livestock systems, improve agricultural productivity, enhance biodiversity through a gender-responsive agroecological approach, and support the development and implementation of effective climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Restoration Education: A Call to Collective Action

A diversity of practitioners, youth, policymakers, educators, capacity developers and others from across Africa and beyond gathered on 3 June 2021 to call for immediate action to restore Africa’s landscapes. These individuals were brought together in a session titled “Enhancing Restoration Capacities in African Drylands: A Decade for Action,” organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in collaboration with the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) and the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF). This session was part of the larger GLF Africa 2021 digital conference. Participants, seeing the urgent need to restore Africa’s landscapes, concluded that such a massive restoration effort demands the mobilization of existing capacities from across the continent. Educational institutions – from schools to colleges and universities – have a significant role to play. In addition, there are many training opportunities for professionals.

Online Course: Stakeholder Engagement with Evidence

Decision-making in landscapes and socio ecological systems is rarely straightforward. Challenges such as land degradation, competing land uses, and balancing conservation with development exist within constantly shifting policy, social, economic and environmental contexts.
To make decisions that endure, we need the right people at the table and the right evidence in the room. Stakeholder engagement is essential. Decisions made in isolation often fail to take root. By working collaboratively bringing together diverse knowledge, experiences, and perspectives we can build decisions that are more inclusive, evidence-informed, and sustainable.
The Stakeholder Approach to Risk Informed and Evidence-Based Decision-Making (SHARED), developed by CIFOR-ICRAF, offers a valuable framework to guide this process. By combining participatory engagement, systems thinking, and data-driven insights, the SHARED approach supports stakeholders to co-create solutions.

Capacity development and education strategy 2025–2035

CIFOR-ICRAF is a global leader in research and action on nature-based solutions. CIFOR-ICRAF promotes landscape approaches and the use of trees, forests and agroforestry to address the world’s greatest challenges. Established through the 2019 merger of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and World Agroforestry (ICRAF), the organization brings together almost 50 years of expertise and a proven track record of transformative science.
The CIFOR-ICRAF 2025–2035 Strategy outlines how we translate our scientific knowledge into action: we strengthen societal capacities to shape climate solutions, restore ecosystems, enhance food systems, and improve lives and livelihoods. In doing so, we emphasize the importance of collaborative learning and capacity development to equip smallholders, young professionals, entrepreneurs and policymakers with the knowledge and skills to embrace the complex nature of today’s challenges and lead the way towards lasting change.
This formed the rationale behind the establishment of CIFOR-ICRAF’s Capacity Development and Education Hub (CDE) at the end of 2023, with the aim of supporting projects in their capacity development actions, accelerating their outcomes, and increasing our collective impact. Although CDE is still in its infancy, our ambitions for 2025–2035 are high, as expressed in our strategy presented here. This strategy is the result of a one-year process of consultation through interviews, focus group discussions, as well as online and offline workshops with representatives from across CIFOR-ICRAF.

Resilient Landscapes is powered by CIFOR-ICRAF. Our mission is to connect private and public actors in co-beneficial landscapes; provide evidence-based business cases for nature-based solutions and green economy investments; leverage and de-risk performance-driven investments with combined financial, social and environmental returns.

Learn more about Resilient Landscapes Luxembourg

2026 All rights reserved    Privacy notice