Zombies in Africa

Across Africa’s drylands, across the Sahel, and across the expanse of the Great Green Wall, it is easy to miss the signs of hope. Countless reports confirm the extreme challenges facing those regions and their rural peoples.

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Yet, within that misery, there are hundreds of bright sparks.

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Villages thriving against seemingly insurmountable odds.

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Landscapes green with swaying grasses and shady trees, surrounded by oceans of desiccated drylands.

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Healthy, gorgeously clothed women, children and men, gaining their livelihoods from areas where you or I would soon be dead from thirst and hunger.

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They may be pastoralists or farmers. They may be gaining their livelihoods from markets, or providing for their own subsistence. They may be close to infrastructure, or be many hours from the nearest tarmacked road.

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But they all have one thing in common.

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They have built and are implementing effective governance models for the management of the natural resources they depend on.

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Whether these resources are trees and their products, manure, grasslands or water, the secret of their prosperity is their clever and equitable management of soils, livestock and trees.

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Those communities that agree when and where animals may or may not graze, who may or may not harvest wood from which trees, and which value chains to collectively develop? They tend to thrive.

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Those who can’t agree? They usually don’t.

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The largest most widespread land restoration is found in countries whose governments have recognized and encouraged this dynamic. And the heroes can come from the most unlikely places.

Behold President Mahamadou Issoufou, who ruled Niger before peacefully stepping down after the last presidential election, his mandate done. Alone amongst the region’s leaders he recognized this dynamic’s importance and changed his country’s legislation to encourage it. His tool? A presidential decree – short, sharp, and to the point – that made it absolutely clear to everyone that trees regenerated by farmers on their lands belonged to those farmers, no ifs or buts.

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The same dynamic is key to the most successful donor-funded land restoration efforts. At CIFOR-ICRAF, we have recently concluded the EU-funded Regreening Africa project. By working with communities and empowering them to implement their land restoration plans, we managed to restore nearly 1,000,000 ha of land across eight African countries in five years, for an average cost hovering around €35-45 a hectare.

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Yet these efforts remain the exception rather than rule. Across the GGW area, the story is far more often one of complex administrative procedures, interfering officials, and misguided rural development efforts.

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This is compounded by a popular perspective that seeks to simplify these landscapes in the belief that prosperity lies in irrigated, fertilized, mechanized monocultures. And this, despite decades of effort and billions of failed investment.

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That idea is what epistemologists call a zombie idea: it’s been repeatedly disproved, lacking in empirical evidence, but arising from the dead again and again.

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By contrast, the tools typically deployed by thriving communities – the managed regeneration of trees, planned grazing, other forms of sustainable land management – have been repeatedly proven to work. Yet they fail to attract the investment needed to reach many (let alone most!) communities across Africa’s drylands.

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Let us leave the zombies behind. Let us embrace life.

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That is what working with communities promises.