Community-Led Landscape Restoration in Sub-Saharan Africa

Across sixteen landscape restoration initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa, the ones that have lasted for decades grew from practices local people already used and from secure local rights to land, trees or wildlife; the ones challenged in court or in the scientific literature were directed from outside or claimed more than their evidence could carry.

Overview

This brief profiles restoration work at landscape scale that joins ecological repair to the social, cultural and economic life of the people who live on the land, and in which those people hold real decision-making power. “Holistic landscape restoration” is used here in that broad, descriptive sense. It includes Allan Savory’s trademarked Holistic Management as one case among many, with the scientific dispute over its grazing claims set out in its entry.

The starting question was the Muonde Trust, a farmer-researcher organization in Mazvihwa, south-central Zimbabwe, so Muonde receives the fullest treatment. The other fifteen entries range from a single watershed in Tigray to continental programs covering the Sahel, and include five South African cases near the Cape coast, where water funds, biosphere reserves and title-deed easements offer instruments a BioHub can use directly.

Most outcome figures in this field come from the initiatives themselves or from their funders. This page tags each factual claim. [IC] marks a claim confirmed by two or more independent sources, a peer-reviewed study by people outside the initiative, or an official record. [TBV] marks a claim that is plausible and unconfirmed, and on this page that includes every outcome an initiative reports about itself, including in papers its own staff co-authored, however many of its own outlets repeat it. [MS] is reserved on this wiki for Michael Haupt’s own project documents and does not appear here. Money is given in the currency and year reported.

The final two sections are the wiki’s own reading. The patterns section draws conclusions across the cases, and the BioHub section relates them to the BioConomy’s instruments. Both go beyond what any single source states.

The cases at a glance

Initiative	Country	Began	Reported scale	Main evidence
Muonde Trust	Zimbabwe	Research from mid-1980s; trust 2008 to 2014	Parts of two wards in one communal area	Self-reported; co-authored peer-reviewed papers
Zephaniah Phiri’s water harvesting	Zimbabwe	Projects founded 1984 to 1986	One farm, then farmer networks	Biography, press, Muonde records
Africa Centre for Holistic Management	Zimbabwe	1992	About 3,000 ha site; partner land figures conflict	Self-reported; contested by meta-analysis
Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration	Niger, then the Sahel and East Africa	1983	About 5 million ha in southern Niger	Independent studies
Zaï pits and Yacouba Sawadogo	Burkina Faso	About 1980	One forest of about 25 ha; regional spread unmeasured	Award bodies; few measurements
Abraha We Atsbaha	Ethiopia	1990s	One watershed	Independent studies
Shinyanga ngitili (HASHI)	Tanzania	1986	300,000 to 350,000 ha	Independent studies
Northern Rangelands Trust	Kenya	2004	6.37 million ha (NRT figure)	Self-reported; court ruling on two conservancies
Communal conservancies	Namibia	1996 law; 1998 first registrations	166,184 km²	Ministry and support-network reports
Great Green Wall	Sahel	2007	About 4 percent of intervention zone (2020)	UN status report
AFR100	34 countries	2015	129.5 million ha pledged	Self-reported
Living Lands and Commonland	South Africa	2009	400,000 ha (Commonland figure)	Self-reported
Greater Cape Town Water Fund	South Africa	2018	41,000 to 63,000 ha cleared (figures differ)	City of Cape Town records
Working for Water	South Africa	1995	National	Independent evaluations, critical
Overberg Renosterveld Trust	South Africa	2014 reserve; 2017 easements	7,110 ha under easement (2024)	Self-reported; provincial proclamation
Gouritz Cluster Biosphere Reserve and CapeNature stewardship	South Africa	2003 stewardship; 2015 biosphere	3.19 million ha biosphere	UNESCO and statutory records

Zimbabwe

Muonde Trust (Mazvihwa, Zvishavane District)

Place. Muonde works in Mazvihwa Communal Area, Midlands Province, mainly in Mhototi Ward and parts of Murowa Ward [TBV]. The area is semi-arid, with rainfall that varies sharply within and between years, and falls in the lowest-potential agricultural zone of Zimbabwe’s classification [TBV]. Muonde reports rainfall below 500 mm a year, which it describes as too dry for reliable maize [TBV]. It describes its community as the VaNgowa chiefdom, chiKaranga-speaking and made up of many clans, some of whom now live on resettlement land: Muonde reports that 97 families from Murowa were moved to Shashe Block near Mashava to make way for a diamond mine [TBV].

How it began. Abraham Mawere Ndhlovu (also written Ndlovu), from Mudhomori village, joined a research team in Mazvihwa in 1986 after finishing secondary school [TBV]. He and Ken Wilson, an outside researcher, are named as Muonde’s founders and have interviewed Mazvihwa farmers regularly since the mid-1980s [TBV]. Sources differ on when Wilson began: muonde.org describes an external adviser “who has worked in the area since 1980”, and Friends of Muonde gives the mid-1980s [TBV]. Muonde describes the trust as “an idea formalized in 2008 and completed in 2014 among friends who have worked together in Mazvihwa since the mid-1980s” [TBV]. A 2025 UNDP story says Muonde was founded in honor of the water harvester Zephaniah Phiri; Muonde’s own pages present a longer research lineage in which Phiri is an innovator whose knowledge the trust documents and shares [TBV].

Governance. Muonde states that its Board has five women and three men from Mazvihwa, plus an external adviser who has worked in the area since 1980 [TBV]. Its staff are mostly women, all from Mazvihwa; Friends of Muonde counts around thirty staff and full-time volunteers, with Abraham Mawere as Director and Alice Ndlovu as Director of Operations [TBV]. The Board chair, Takura Moyo, is described as a Mazvihwa innovator who developed orchards and water harvesting in the late 1990s [TBV]. Muonde says it “has no office and instead has many bicycles, cellphones and a small truck” [TBV].

How decisions are made. Muonde says its programs “emerge, grow and evolve depending on what is exciting the community” [TBV]. Its stated method is to study the problem underneath a local difficulty, find people in the area already solving it, and spread their solutions through peer-to-peer and farmer-to-farmer training [TBV]. Traditional authority blesses the work. Ndhlovu told UNDP that “the Chiefs connect every initiative to the ancestors by blessing it for success” [TBV]. UNDP reports that Chief Mazvihwa and his headman set up Environmental and Forestry Protection Committees in response to Muonde’s work, to monitor forests and prevent indiscriminate felling [TBV].

Methods. Water harvesting in the Phiri tradition (swales, ponds, contours marked with A-frames), dry stone walling, live hedges, sand abstraction from dry riverbeds, forestry plots, indigenous small grains and open-pollinated seed, household architecture and kitchen design, plastics disposal, and participatory mapping of water sources and cultural sites [TBV].

Community-held data and a model. Muonde’s research team, about thirty people with more women than men, has recorded the area’s crops, livestock and woodland for over three decades [TBV]. In 2020 the team and outside modelers published a participatory agent-based model of that system in PLOS ONE, built from the Muonde archive, Zimbabwean government rainfall records and the literature [IC]. The community helped set the model’s goals and checked its structure in workshops; outside modelers wrote the code and ran the large simulations; the paper classifies each stage of the process by who drove it [IC]. In the model’s 499,200 runs, storing grain for three years did more for the system’s survival than any other intervention, and interventions that smoothed year-to-year swings improved sustainability [IC]. Interventions that broke the feedbacks between cattle, crops and woodland made the system less stable: stone walls that protected crops let cattle starve in dry years, and feed subsidies let herds outgrow their forage [IC]. The paper reports that Muonde then used the model with local leaders, and that new rules let farmers return to fallow fields before clearing woodland grazing, piloted in Mudhomori and nearby villages [TBV]. A companion paper in Ecology and Society explores definitions of sustainability at the scale of Mudhomori village (about 600 hectares), and a 2021 paper in Citizen Science: Theory and Practice examines the power relations between the outside researchers and the community [TBV].

Outputs reported. Under the UNDP-Adaptation Fund Climate Innovation Accelerator, Muonde trained 30 women and 20 men, five of whom became trainers, and built nearly 700 meters of dry stone wall and more than 800 meters of live hedge [TBV]. In Ward 16 it set up two forestry plots of 2 hectares each, and 80 percent of new sand abstraction plots went to young women [TBV]. PELUM Zimbabwe reports that 17 women have worked with Muonde since 2021 under the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action, after six months of training [TBV]. Muonde reports that 34 organizations have visited to learn its water harvesting and dry stone walling [TBV].

Funding. Friends of Muonde, a project of Earth Island Institute in Berkeley, California, launched in 2013 [TBV]. It describes itself as funded by individuals and small foundations, and it makes grants to registered Zimbabwean non-profits, including the Muonde Trust and the Phiri Award for Food and Farm Innovators Trust [TBV]. Project grants such as the UNDP accelerator come on top [TBV]. No budget figures were found.

Spread. On 16 to 20 December 2024 Muonde ran a water harvesting training in Hanamonga Village, Monze District, Zambia, a village of about 150 households [TBV]. The two-person team first met local authorities for consent, then trained three residents to interpret and carry the work on, and pegged fourteen dead-level contours with the community [TBV]. Muonde states that its innovations “take root and spread within and beyond the Mazvihwa area without the need for institutional backing” [TBV].

Status and evidence. The most recent dated public material found is the UNDP story of 6 November 2025; no 2026 report was found. No independent evaluation or published critique of Muonde was found. Its peer-reviewed outputs are co-authored by its own researchers, so its outcome claims remain [TBV] until an outside study tests them.

Zephaniah Phiri Maseko and the “water harvester” tradition (Zvishavane)

Phiri farmed in semi-arid Zvishavane District and built a system of ponds, pits and contours to hold rain on his land [IC]. He died on 1 September 2015, aged 88 [IC]. His work is described in Mary Witoshynsky’s book The Water Harvester [IC]. The Herald reports that between 1984 and 1986 he founded the Vulindhlebe Soil and Water Conservation project and the Zvishavane Water Project [TBV]; their current status was not found. His phrases “talking with water” and “rhyming with nature” are carried on by Muonde, whose staff include women apprenticed to him [TBV]. Evidence of outcomes beyond his own farm is anecdotal in the sources reviewed.

Africa Centre for Holistic Management (Dimbangombe, near Victoria Falls)

Dates and governance. Holistic Management International launched the Africa Centre in 1992 [TBV]. An FAO case document, drawing on the Centre’s own material, says the Dimbangombe ranch was donated to it in 1994 as a demonstration and learning site, and that the five chiefs of the Hwange community sit on its Board of Trustees [TBV]. The Centre is now a hub of the Savory Institute [TBV].

Scale. Figures conflict. Dimbangombe is given as 3,200 ha by the Savory Institute and the World Future Council, and as 7,500 acres (about 3,035 ha) by Pacific Standard [TBV]. Partner communal land is given as 40,000 ha by the Savory Institute in 2017 and as 400,000 ha in the FAO document [TBV].

Methods and reported outcomes. Holistic Planned Grazing with bunched herds, lion-proof night kraals and elephant-deterrent crop fields [TBV]. A study of Dimbangombe from 2001 to 2009, summarized by the World Future Council from Centre data, reported a 31 percent fall in bare ground and a 56 percent rise in litter cover [TBV].

The scientific dispute. Heidi-Jayne Hawkins’s 2017 meta-analysis compared Holistic Planned Grazing with season-long continuous grazing across studies from 1972 to 2016 and found no difference in plant basal cover, plant biomass or animal gain [IC]. The positive studies tended to come from wetter sites, which the author reads as a sign that the method may suit only rangelands with enough resources [IC]. A rebuttal published outside peer review argues that the studies did not test Holistic Planned Grazing as its handbook defines it, and the Savory Institute reproduces that rebuttal [TBV]. Sierra magazine reported researchers’ estimates that Savory’s carbon claims would need sequestration about eight times the widely accepted rate [TBV]. The range-science literature reviewed for this brief does not show Holistic Planned Grazing outperforming other grazing systems on the measures tested; practitioners and the Savory Institute dispute how those measures were chosen.

The Sahel and the Horn

Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (Maradi, Niger, and its spread)

Origin. FMNR began in 1983 through the Maradi Integrated Development Project of the mission organization SIM, with twelve farmers, and spread mainly from farmer to farmer [IC]. Tony Rinaudo promoted the method in Niger from 1983 and received the Right Livelihood Award in 2018 [IC].

Method. Farmers select shoots growing from living tree stumps and roots in their fields, prune the rest, and protect the chosen stems as they grow into trees [IC].

Scale and outcomes. About 5 million hectares in southern Niger carry around 200 million additional trees attributed to the practice [IC]. Weston and colleagues (2015) reviewed the evidence and added a social return on investment study of an FMNR project in Talensi District, Ghana; they found income and yield gains, and found that asset creation, wider use of wild resources, health and psychosocial benefits added more value than income and yields over the study period [IC]. Higher figures for yield gains and annual value circulate in review summaries and need checking against full texts [TBV].

Spread and limits. The practice is reported in Ghana, Mali, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya [IC]. Adoption varies sharply, even between neighboring villages [IC]. How much of Niger’s greening comes from FMNR, and how much from rainfall recovering after the droughts of the 1980s, has been debated [TBV]. Changes that gave farmers clearer rights over trees on their own fields are often cited as a condition for the spread [TBV].

Zaï pits and Yacouba Sawadogo (Gourga, Yatenga Province, Burkina Faso)

Sawadogo (1946 to 3 December 2023) adapted the traditional zaï planting pit from around 1980, digging pits before the rains, widening them and filling them with manure [IC]. He received the Right Livelihood Award in 2018 and was named a UNEP Champion of the Earth in 2020 [IC]. He is reported to have held twice-yearly market days at his farm to share the method, and to have grown a forest of about 25 hectares [TBV]. Right Livelihood states that by 2016 zaï had helped restore “tens of thousands of hectares” in Yatenga and Gourcy provinces, an estimate without a published survey behind it [TBV]. The condition of the forest since his death, amid insecurity in northern Burkina Faso, is unknown.

Abraha We Atsbaha watershed (Atsbi Wenberta, Tigray, Ethiopia)

Restoration here was led by the farmer Gebremichael Giday, known as Aba Hawi, and the community received the UN Equator Prize in 2012 [IC]. From the 1990s it combined water harvesting in fields and outside them, upland soil and water conservation, area closures that kept livestock off degraded slopes, and hand-dug wells [IC]. Groundwater results differ by study: an IWMI working paper reports a rise of about 5 meters, and Negusse and colleagues (2013) report roughly a tenfold increase in groundwater availability since 1993 [IC]; a larger rise, from 15 meters to 3 meters below the surface, appears in one summary [TBV]. IWMI found effects from upland conservation within three years [IC]. The work drew on state-organized community labor campaigns [TBV]. The war in Tigray from 2020 to 2022 damaged agriculture across the region [IC], and the watershed’s present condition is unknown.

East Africa

Shinyanga Soil Conservation Programme, HASHI (Shinyanga Region, Tanzania)

What it revived. Ngitili are Sukuma dry-season fodder reserves, closed to grazing in the wet season so that grass and trees can grow. Many were lost during the forced villagization of the 1970s [IC]. A Tanzanian government program, HASHI, worked with Sukuma communities from 1986 to 2004 to restore them [IC]. Its early planting of exotic trees failed for lack of local ownership [TBV].

Scale. About 600 hectares of documented ngitili in 1986 grew by 2004 to roughly 300,000 hectares (Barrow, 2014) or at least 350,000 hectares across 833 villages (the Equator Initiative, which gave HASHI a 2002 Equator Prize) [IC]. The higher figure was extrapolated from samples by project managers [TBV]. About half the area is held by groups and half by individuals [IC].

Governance. Village by-laws, given legal force by Tanzania’s 1999 village land legislation, and local guards (sungusungu) enforced the enclosures [IC]. Barrow attributes the result chiefly to policy change, decentralized and participatory governance, attention to local needs and benefits, respect for Sukuma knowledge and institutions, and individual champions, and concludes that “local community incorporation/ownership is key” [IC]. The practice persisted after HASHI withdrew [IC]. Crop and livestock damage from returning wildlife is one reported cost [IC].

Northern Rangelands Trust (northern and coastal Kenya)

Scale and model. NRT’s 2025 annual report states that it was founded in 2004 and now brings together 47 community conservancies across 6.37 million hectares [TBV]. It runs the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project (Verra project 1468), which it describes as the world’s largest soil carbon removal project, generating credits from changes in grazing [TBV].

Litigation. In January 2025 Kenya’s Environment and Land Court in Isiolo ruled that the Cherab and Biliqo Bulesa conservancies had been established unconstitutionally without proper public participation, barred armed rangers there, and ordered the registration of community land [IC]. The case was brought by 165 pastoralists from Isiolo County [IC]. On 1 April 2025 the court refused NRT’s request to stay the ruling, and NRT has appealed [IC]. NRT’s chief executive argued that the ruling disrupted conservation and livelihoods, and NRT states that the case did not raise carbon issues [TBV].

Critiques and the carbon project. The Oakland Institute (2021) and Survival International (2023) allege restricted grazing and rights abuses [TBV]. Verra suspended the carbon project after the January 2025 ruling [IC], and a trade outlet reported its reinstatement in June 2026 [TBV]. The wiki’s brief on corporate partnerships in protected areas cites NRT conservancies as a precedent for community monitoring; the 2025 ruling bears on that reading.

Namibia

Communal conservancies

A 1996 amendment to Namibia’s Nature Conservation Ordinance gave communities conditional rights over wildlife and tourism through registered conservancies, and the first four were registered in 1998 [IC]. Each conservancy is self-governing through an elected committee, and the ministry can deregister one that fails its obligations [IC]. NACSO, the network of support organizations, reports 86 registered conservancies covering 166,184 km² with about 244,587 residents [TBV]. In 2017, 69 of 86 conservancies generated returns and 39 covered their own operating costs [TBV]. A National Communal Conservancies and Community Forest Alliance was launched on 1 October 2024 [TBV]. The 2022 State of Community Conservation report, published by the ministry with NACSO, names mining rights granted inside conservancies, encroachment into wildlife zones and dependence on tourism as pressures [IC].

Continental programs

The Great Green Wall (Sahel)

Launched in 2007 under the African Union, the Great Green Wall aims to restore 100 million hectares by 2030 [IC]. The UNCCD’s status report of September 2020 found that about 4 percent of the Wall’s intervention zone had been restored, and that restoration across the participating countries came to roughly 18 to 20 million hectares once land outside that zone was counted [IC]; an often-cited 12 million hectares of the wider figure lies in Ethiopia [TBV]. From 2007 to 2018 the program reported over 350,000 jobs and about USD 90 million in revenues [IC]. Reaching the 2030 target would need 8.2 million hectares a year at about USD 4.3 billion a year [IC]. The report names financing, governance, institutions and monitoring as obstacles [IC]. A UNCCD observatory launched in 2024 now tracks funding and projects [TBV].

AFR100 (African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative)

AFR100 reports that 34 countries have pledged 129.5 million hectares against its target of 100 million hectares by 2030, including 3.6 million hectares pledged by South Africa in 2017 [TBV]. AUDA-NEPAD, which hosts the initiative, stated in July 2026 that 17 million hectares had been restored and 12 million placed under restoration; this brief saw that statement only in summary [TBV]. Verified delivery against pledges is poorly documented.

South Africa: the Cape

Living Lands and Commonland (Baviaanskloof and Langkloof, Eastern Cape)

Living Lands has worked in the region since 2009 and describes its role as that of “facilitators on the landscape”, using Theory U [TBV]. Commonland, the Dutch foundation behind the 4 Returns framework described on the wiki’s integrated landscape management page, partnered with Living Lands and the social enterprise Grounded in 2014 and has committed to the landscape from 2016 to 2036 [TBV]. The partners set up three companies: Baviaanskloof Development Company (essential oils), Langkloof Honeybush Company (honeybush tea) and Baviaanskloof Bewarea (ecological rehabilitation) [TBV]. Commonland lists 400,000 hectares and 50 jobs; the Baviaanskloof Hartland covers 41,000 hectares, and Living Lands gives the Langkloof as 140,000 hectares [TBV]. Methods include earth bunds to hold rainfall and regenerative farming planned across natural, combined and economic zones [TBV]. Langkloof partners include fire protection associations, the honeybush tea association and an irrigation board [TBV]. In 2018 the partners sought doctoral research to build their monitoring [TBV]. No independent evaluation was found.

Greater Cape Town Water Fund (Western Cape)

The City of Cape Town invited The Nature Conservancy in 2016, and the fund launched in November 2018 [TBV]. A coalition of national departments, the City, SANBI, CapeNature, WWF and companies directs it [TBV]. Its business case estimated that invasive alien plants were costing 55 billion liters of water a year [TBV]. The City committed R50 million in 2021 [IC]. Clearing figures differ by source: TNC reports more than 41,000 hectares; the City reports 41,306 hectares of initial clearing since April 2019 plus 50,644 hectares of follow-up, and a City statement in March 2025 gives nearly 63,000 hectares [IC]. The City reports water gains of 48 to 51 million liters a day, and 787 green jobs [IC]. In 2026 a performance-based bond was announced to fund five years of work; the wiki covers it under performance-based water bonds [IC]. Community involvement here comes mainly through employment, with decisions held by the coalition. No equivalent fund was found elsewhere on the Southern Cape; the nearest is a water source partnership in the Outeniqua and Tsitsikamma mountains backed by WWF and the Garden Route Biosphere Reserve [TBV].

Working for Water and the Natural Resource Management programs

Launched in 1995, Working for Water clears invasive alien plants through public works jobs [IC]. De Lange and van Wilgen (2010) estimated that invasive plants cost South Africa R6.5 billion a year, and about R41.7 billion more would be lost without control [IC]. A review of work from 1998 to 2020 found that more than a quarter of control effort fell outside priority areas and that effectiveness was not monitored regularly [IC]. Studies describe the program as a transitory and limited route out of poverty and find that workers came to depend on project work [IC]. A doctoral study reported in 2025 found inconsistent workdays, irregular training and budget cuts [IC]. The program reports over 200,000 person-years of employment, more than half held by women [TBV].

Overberg Renosterveld Trust (Overberg, Western Cape)

Renosterveld, a shrubland of the fertile lowlands of the Cape, has about 5 percent of its original extent left intact, most of the rest having been ploughed [IC]. The trust took over management of the Haarwegskloof Renosterveld Reserve from WWF South Africa in 2014, and Haarwegskloof was proclaimed a provincial nature reserve in April 2025 [IC]. In 2017 the trust began a conservation easement program: a farmer registers a conservation servitude on the title deed in the trust’s favor, with a management plan; the land stays the farmer’s, the easement binds later owners, and the trust supports alien clearing, ecological burns, erosion control, fencing and wildlife monitoring [TBV]. The 22nd easement, signed in February 2024, brought the program to 7,110 hectares, 4,600 of them critically endangered vegetation [TBV]. Three easements link corridors between Swellendam and Heidelberg [TBV]. A 500-hectare part of Plaatjieskraal was bought after sixteen years of negotiation with a coalition of international funders [TBV]. The trust reports a proposed mine whose footprint overlaps critically endangered renosterveld [TBV]. Restored renosterveld also recovers soil carbon (see Mills and Cowling, 2013, below).

Gouritz Cluster Biosphere Reserve and CapeNature stewardship (Western Cape)

The Gouritz Cluster Biosphere Reserve was founded in 2011 as a non-profit company governed by its members, and UNESCO designated it on 9 June 2015 as South Africa’s seventh biosphere reserve, covering 3,187,893 hectares [IC]. It runs a Resilient Rivers project in the Goukou catchment (2018 to 2025) with a Dutch foundation, CapeNature, Hessequa Municipality and national wetland programs, and an ecological corridors project built on extension work with landowners [TBV]. The foundation’s targets for connectivity (140,000 ha) and restoration (11,000 ha) are goals, with results still to be reported [TBV]. The neighboring Garden Route Biosphere Reserve was designated in 2017 and covers 698,363 hectares [IC].

CapeNature’s Biodiversity Stewardship Programme, running since 2003, gives private and communal landowners four routes into formal protection: a conservation area, a biodiversity agreement (usually ten years in the Western Cape, with CapeNature paying legal costs), a protected environment and a nature reserve [IC]. Its legal basis is now the Western Cape Biodiversity Act 6 of 2021 [IC]. These instruments, with the Overberg trust’s easements, are the Cape’s nearest equivalent to the tenure arrangements that made the East African and Namibian cases work.

Patterns across the cases

This section is the wiki’s reading of the cases. It draws on the sources above and goes beyond what any one of them states.

Local practice came first

The cases with the strongest independent evidence revived or extended something people already did. Ngitili were Sukuma practice before HASHI; zaï pits were a West African technique before Sawadogo widened them; FMNR worked with stumps already in farmers’ fields; Phiri’s ponds grew from his own farm. Muonde’s stated method is to find such practices and back them. Where outsiders introduced a method, as with HASHI’s early exotic trees, it failed until communities owned it.

Long apprenticeships before institutions

Formal bodies came late. Muonde’s founders worked together for over twenty years before formalizing a trust in 2008, and took six more to complete it. HASHI ran for eighteen years. The Overberg trust negotiated one land purchase for sixteen. In each case the institution recorded relationships and results already in place. The Northern Rangelands Trust case shows the reverse sequence: a court found that two conservancies had been set up without the public participation the constitution requires.

Clear rights to land, trees and wildlife

Restoration spread where people held rights they could defend: Namibian conservancies under the 1996 law, Sukuma villages under by-laws backed by the 1999 land law, Nigerien farmers with clearer rights over trees on their fields, Cape farmers under title-deed easements. Where rights were contested, courts stepped in. This is the territory Elinor Ostrom mapped for the commons: rules made and enforced by the people who use the resource.

Communities that keep their own records

Muonde’s farmer-researchers hold three decades of data, and that record let them build a model their leaders could argue with. The Great Green Wall had no shared monitoring until 2024, and Working for Water’s effectiveness went unmonitored for long stretches. Initiatives that held their own long records could defend their claims; those that relied on project reporting could not. Even so, the best-recorded community case here, Muonde, still lacks an outside evaluation.

Spread by invitation

FMNR and zaï moved from farmer to farmer and through market days and visits. Muonde reached Zambia after nearly four decades, by invitation, starting with local consent and three local interpreters. Policy carried the Namibian and Tanzanian models once the law recognized community rights. Continental targets (the Great Green Wall, AFR100) moved pledges faster than they moved hectares.

Authority comes in different forms

In Mazvihwa, Hwange and Shinyanga, initiatives worked through chiefs, headmen and village by-laws. In the Western Cape the equivalent authority is legal and administrative: title deeds, provincial stewardship declarations, catchment agencies and municipalities. A model that depends on a chief’s blessing has no direct counterpart on private farmland, and an easement registered on a title deed has no direct counterpart on communal land.

Money at arm’s length

Muonde’s money passes through a separately governed foundation abroad, which regrants to the locally governed trust. Commonland funds separate local companies. The Cape Town water fund pools public and private money under a coalition and now a bond. The sharpest scrutiny in this set fell on carbon finance in northern Kenya, where credits depended on grazing changes in conservancies whose legal standing was then challenged.

What failed, and why

Imported trees in Shinyanga failed without local ownership. Working for Water’s job model produced dependency and spent effort outside priority areas. Great Green Wall pledges outran delivery and monitoring. Two NRT conservancies lost legal standing over consent. Holistic Planned Grazing’s claims outran its evidence. Each failure came where the initiative’s design ran ahead of local ownership, legal footing or measurement.

What the cases suggest for a BioHub

This section relates the cases to the BioConomy’s instruments. It is a structural inference and has not been tested against these initiatives.

Gestate before registering. Muonde’s twenty-year path to a trust matches the wiki’s argument for entity gestation: work under a compact first, and choose a legal form once the place has said what work the entity is for.

Start from the place’s own knowledge. The durable cases began with what local people already did. The Place Mandate Template starts from the same point, and the direction-of-fit check guards against outside funders setting the work.

Hold the data locally. A BioHub that sells verified outcomes, for example under a performance-based bond, needs the kind of long, community-held record Muonde built, and it needs an independent check of that record. Reed and colleagues (2017) found no tropical landscape initiative with robust data on trade-offs; verification has to be designed in from the start.

Smooth variation, keep feedbacks intact. In Muonde’s model, grain storage, which carried good years into bad ones, did the most for survival, and outside subsidies that cut the link between herds and forage destabilized the system. Read across to finance, this favors reserves and buffers that hold value in the place, the subject of retention logic, over flows of outside money that let local feedbacks lapse. The model was built for one village’s cattle, crops and woodland; the analogy to money is the wiki’s own.

Secure tenure before selling outcomes. The Northern Rangelands Trust case shows that a carbon or water service sold from land whose governance is disputed can be suspended by a court or a registry. Easements, stewardship agreements and registered community rights come first.

Water harvesting is the common technique. Phiri’s ponds, zaï pits, Abraha We Atsbaha’s terraces and Living Lands’ bunds all slow and hold water in the soil, the practice set out on the water retention landscapes page.

Right of reply. This page describes the published work and public statements of the Muonde Trust, Friends of Muonde, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, the Savory Institute, World Vision, the Northern Rangelands Trust, NACSO, the UNCCD, AUDA-NEPAD, Living Lands, Commonland, The Nature Conservancy, the City of Cape Town, the Overberg Renosterveld Trust, the Gouritz Cluster Biosphere Reserve, CapeNature and the authors cited. None of them has yet replied to this reading.

Not yet covered

• Ethiopia’s national programs (MERET and the Sustainable Land Management Programme), often credited with the labor behind Tigray’s watershed work.
• Justdiggit (Kenya and Tanzania) and other East African cases.
• Grounded’s own work in the Karoo, beyond its role as a Commonland partner.
• Community-led cases in Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda and Senegal, and FMNR’s spread in Ghana beyond the Talensi study.
• The present state of the projects Phiri founded, and of Sawadogo’s forest.

Related

• Integrated Landscape Management
• Landscape Partnership (glossary)
• Stewardship (glossary)
• Water Retention Landscapes
• Performance-Based Water Bonds
• Entity Gestation
• Retention Logic
• Corporate Partnerships in Protected-Area Landscapes
• Bioprecipitation
• The Overberg BioRegion on the BioHubs directory

Sources

• Eitzel, M.V., et al. (2020). Using mixed methods to construct and analyze a participatory agent-based model of a complex Zimbabwean agro-pastoral system
• Hawkins, H.-J. (2017). A global assessment of Holistic Planned Grazing compared with season-long, continuous grazing
• Weston, P., et al. (2015). Farmer-managed natural regeneration enhances rural livelihoods in dryland West Africa
• Barrow, E. (2014). 300,000 Hectares Restored in Shinyanga, Tanzania
• UNCCD (2020). The Great Green Wall: Implementation status and way ahead to 2030
• Reed, J., et al. (2017). Have integrated landscape approaches reconciled societal and environmental issues in the tropics?
• Dudley, N., et al. (2021). The 4 Returns Framework for Landscape Restoration
• The Nature Conservancy (2018). Greater Cape Town Water Fund Business Case
• Mills, A.J., Cowling, R.M., et al. (2013). Restoring the fauna and flora of transformed renosterveld
• Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons

Works without a source page yet

• Muonde Trust. Home, “Our Place”, “Our Work”, “People”, Hanamonga training report.
• Friends of Muonde. “About” and “The Muonde Trust”.
• UNDP Climate Change Adaptation (2025). “Transforming drylands into wetlands: a hero’s legacy in Zimbabwe”.
• Eitzel, M.V., et al. (2020). “Indigenous climate adaptation sovereignty in a Zimbabwean agro-pastoral system.” Ecology and Society 25(4):13. ResearchGate record.
• Eitzel, M.V., et al. (2021). “Assessing the Potential of Participatory Modeling for Decolonial Restoration of an Agro-Pastoral System in Rural Zimbabwe.” Citizen Science: Theory and Practice.
• PELUM Zimbabwe. “Women band together to restore degraded landscapes in Mazvihwa”.
• FAO. “Holistic management of livestock, Zimbabwe, 2001 to 2009”.
• World Future Council (2019). Africa Centre for Holistic Management factsheet.
• Sierra Club (2017). “Allan Savory says more cows on the land will reverse climate change”.
• Suuk, et al. (2025). FMNR origins and spread. Human Ecology.
• Tappan, G., et al. USGS publication on regreening in Niger.
• Right Livelihood. Yacouba Sawadogo.
• Yale ELTI. Abraha We Atsbaha water harvesting assessment.
• World Peace Foundation. “Tigray’s wounded agriculture”.
• Equator Initiative. HASHI case study.
• Sustainability (2021). Ngitili after HASHI.
• Daily Nation (2025). “Northern Rangelands Trust loses conservancies in landmark ruling” and “Blow to Northern Rangelands’ quest for Isiolo conservancies”.
• REDD-Monitor. Verra suspension of the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project.
• NACSO. Conservancies; Conservation Namibia, communal conservancies factsheet and State of Community Conservation 2022.
• Africa Renewal (2020). “Africa’s Great Green Wall: close to 18 million hectares of land restored”.
• AFR100. Home and South Africa; AUDA-NEPAD, “Africa’s greatest comeback starts with land”.
• Commonland. Baviaanskloof and Langkloof; Living Lands, Langkloof.
• City of Cape Town. “Clearing alien invasive plants saves up to 16.1 billion litres of water each year”.
• Cape Town Etc. “City reclaims 18 billion litres through invasive plant clearing”; ESI Africa, “Cape Town to save billions of litres of water by culling alien plants”.
• The Conversation (2025). “South Africa’s Working for Water programme is meant to lead to skills and jobs”.
• CapeNature (2025). “Haarwegskloof declared nature reserve”.
• World Land Trust. Overberg Renosterveld Conservation Trust.

Provenance

Written 14 October 2026 from a deep research run on the Muonde Trust and community-led landscape restoration in sub-Saharan Africa, carried out in the Isikhova & Ironwood project, with the main citations checked against the publishers’ records. Editorial decisions:

• Claims that rest only on an initiative’s own materials, its funders’ stories or papers its staff co-authored are tagged [TBV], following the wiki’s practice on Integrated Landscape Management; the research report had tagged these as mission-sourced, a tag this wiki reserves for Michael Haupt’s documents.
• Model findings from the peer-reviewed PLOS ONE paper are tagged [IC] as published analysis; the policy outcome the same paper reports is tagged [TBV].
• Lessons for one farm near Heidelberg, Western Cape, and local conservancy detail around it, have been left out of this international version; they belong on the Isikhova & Ironwood planning site.
• Ethiopia’s national programs were researched too thinly to include and are listed under Not yet covered.
• Where sources give conflicting figures (Dimbangombe, Shinyanga, the Cape Town water fund, the Great Green Wall), all are reported with their sources.
• The page carries academic-inference: the cases rest on the cited literature, and the two closing sections are the wiki author’s structural inference, marked as such.