Rehabilitation of degraded lands in sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons learned from selected case studies

The urgency for rehabilitation has been widely recognized for many years and sub-Saharan Africa has been the focus of many initiatives in this area. There have been many successes as well as some failures but published details are mostly in the “grey” literature and are thus not easily accessible. A total of 14 such cases are included as annexes to the report, detailing the objectives and results and the reasons for success or failure. These case studies cover the three main ecological zones of Sub-Saharan Africa, the bulk of them being concerned with the dry land ecosystem (7 cases) , and come from field work in the woodlands of Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Northern Cameroon. The remaining 7 cases are distributed almost equally between the sub-humid ecosystem (4 cases, from the Manyara, Shinyanga and Dodoma Regions of Tanzania, and the Upper East Region of Ghana) and the humid ecosystem (3 cases, from the Western and Brong Ahafo Regions of Ghana). This distribution is revealing, as it reflects the high priority given to the rehabilitation of degraded dry lands in view of the greater threat of desertification in that ecological zone. Eleven of the cases studied are regarded as generally successful, whilst the remaining 3 are more of a failure. Nevertheless, they all represent excellent learning points for charting the way forward for future rehabilitation of degraded lands.