In the above initiatives, self-motivated populations increased food security and reduced vulnerabilities to climatic shocks by restoring and sustainably managing local forest resources. To regenerate agroforestry parklands, farmers built on traditional systems to increase on-farm tree density and convert degraded lands to densely wooded savannas. These actions increased crop yields and produced new sources of livestock browse. The population of Sambandé restored the local forest and managed it to sustainably produce fuel and fruit. The agroforestry parklands were restored without a project.
Modest project support helped the Sambandé community to establish local institutions that set and enforced rules that applied sound forest management practices and strengthened targeted value chains. Project assistance was phased out when the community’s capacity was sufficiently strong to manage the forest sustainably. The sustained achievements from the locally managed initiatives described above lie in stark contrast to the poor track record of longer-term impacts from many large, centrally controlled projects that focus more on infrastructure than on capacity building.

While the Sambandé projects built the community’s capacity to exercise choices when managing forest resources and enterprises, centrally controlled projects often make critical decisions in the place of the ultimate beneficiaries, weakening the sense of local ownership and increasing the chance that forest management will not continue after the end of project.

The time and effort needed to scale up these successes have been much reduced by taking stock of what has worked. This includes identifying the changes that led to success, such as the transfer of rights and responsibilities, use of appropriate technologies, greater roles for local populations in developing forest value chains, and identifying the steps that established those changes, e.g., training, peer-to-peer visits, and policy modifications.