The annual Land and Poverty Conference is taking place at the World Bank this week with the theme of “Scaling up Responsible Land Governance”. The World Bank, FAO and the GEF Secretariat presented a paper on the Strategic Investment Program (SIP) for Sustainable Land Management (SLM) launched in 2008, under the TerrAfrica platform.
The SIP was the first program for high-level global engagement on the issue of land degradation in Sub-Saharan Africa. To address the weaknesses of previous efforts, this program focused on activities on the ground to scale-up SLM across crop, livestock and forest landscapes, including people-centered approaches like farmer field schools; creating an enabling environment for policy development and multi-stakeholder approaches, targeting vulnerable groups and specific users of land resources as farmers, pastoralists, and female-headed households; strengthening advisory services; and supporting knowledge management and monitoring and evaluation.
The SIP was implemented in 26 countries through a series of 36 projects, including country-based investments, multi-country approaches, and cross-cutting projects developed by six multilateral agencies. The GEF catalyzed over $1 billion in financing, with $150 million from a GEF grant. The paper presented key lessons for future engagement of all partners through an analysis of the whole portfolio, an online survey, and in-depth surveys in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Niger, and Senegal.
The GEF funding proved to be catalytic in implementing SLM on the ground and scaling-up integrated and multi-stakeholder SLM approaches for greater and more sustainable impacts on livelihoods, and for generating global environmental benefits. The program brought 2.7 million hectares under SLM practices for 4.8 million beneficiaries. The SIP portfolio contributed to improve understanding of land degradation and SLM in Sub-Saharan Africa, providing a useful platform and a knowledge base for cross-sectoral work and mainstreaming SLM in national and sub-national policy and planning. Emerging global and regional initiatives on forests, landscapes, ecosystem restoration, and food security for instance, provide opportunities for scaling up SLM and monitoring its progress.