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

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 current erosion taking place in Kenya, we provide a brief history of the various institutions involved and approaches used in combatting soil erosion in Kenya and in Nyakach. We then describe and analyze NYADEC's community-based soil conservation model built on Gully Rehabilitation Trusts, highlighting the contrasts between their land restoration approaches and those of larger scale institutional actors. We argue for enhanced institutional collaboration across multiple scales and along both vertical and horizontal planes, illustrating the promise such holds based on our experience as co-authors coming from different institutional settings. We argue the need not only to scale-up from the grassroots, but to also scale-down from the global institution, and to scale-across both vertical and horizontal lines of institutional collaboration so as to enhance the potency of the cooperative effort it will take to secure lands and livelihoods affected by soil erosion. •Community-based organizations play key roles in landscape restoration in Kenya.•Gully Rehabilitation Trusts (GRTs) are a unique approach to fighting soil erosion.•GRTs engage community members in root-cause intervention using diverse methods.•Building relationships with CBOs and GRTs can enhance global institutional efforts.•Scaling up, down, and across can improve knowledge transfer and collaboration.