Gully Rehabilitation Trusts: Fighting soil erosion through community participation in western Kenya

Abstract

Soil erosion is one of many interlinked factors contributing to land degradation, which has been the focus of recent international agreements, including the Bonn Challenge and the Kigali Declaration on Forest Landscape Restoration in Africa. Although global environmental institutions are coming to recognize that community-based organizations play critical front-line roles in landscape restoration, more can be learned by examining exactly how these grassroots organizations operate, the constraints they face, and the successes they achieve. This paper uses a case-study approach to document and assess the work of the local Kenyan NGO, the Nyando Development Community Center for Environmental Conservation (NYADEC), which is working with farmers living on the erosion-ravaged slopes of Nyakach Sub-county, in southern Kisumu County, in western Kenya. After setting the case-study within the context of …