Through Landscape Restoration, Kenya’s Farmers Build Resilience to Floods

As the first raindrops began to fall in March, Phylis David Kiveli, a farmer in Makueni County, Kenya, felt a wave of relief.

The previous year had been plagued by drought. Many farmers watched helplessly as their crops withered and animals died. This rainy season brought with it a promise of better yields. Kiveli, a member of Ahadi Achievers Empowerment CBO (AAE), an organization restoring degraded landscapes in the Greater Rift Valley, was optimistic that her fruit tree seedlings would soon bloom. From her many years of farming, she knew that the rains would start lightly in March, build up in April, and slowly subside in May.

But this time, things were different.

It rained ceaselessly, day and night. By May, rains still poured.

“I have never seen such heavy rains in my entire life,” Kiveli said. “My only two cows were swept away, and I lost a section of my farm. We couldn’t go outside. There was water everywhere.”

Nearly 300 people died and more than 160 went missing due to Kenya’s unusually heavy rains in March-May 2024. Over 50,000 households were displaced after a series of flash floods closed schools, interrupted health services and destroyed thousands of acres of crops in the East African country.

Anthony Muchiri is the executive director of Development Response-Kenya (DREK), a youth-led organization that plants trees on farms — a practice known as agroforestry — in northeastern Kenya’s Garissa County. While more mature trees can usually withstand floods and other extreme weather, DREK’s main nursery lost 80,000 saplings when a river burst its banks, submerging nearby farms for several weeks.

“We had planted mostly neem and mango trees and were expecting a good yield,” he said. “The flood waters destabilized the tree’s root systems that we had just planted, and we watched sadly as they were washed away.”

Muchiri and Kiveli are both “restoration champions” with TerraFund for AFR100, a fund co-managed by WRI that supports local projects to restore degraded landscapes in Africa — activities like agroforestry, growing native trees such as cashews and fruits, sustainable farming and more. They’re two of countless smallholder farmers and entrepreneurs who lost crops, animals or property during Kenya’s floods.

But just as these farmers are victims of the extreme floods, so, too, are they architects of a solution: Restoring the Greater Rift Valley’s denuded landscapes can help communities better withstand shocks like floods, droughts and other escalating disasters.

A Changing Landscape in Kenya’s Greater Rift Valley

Kenya and parts of East Africa typically experience two rainy seasons: the “long rains” from March to May, and the “short rains” from October to December. This year, Kenya’s weather agency predicted that the long rains would bring flooding and landslides. And they did.

They weren’t a one-off event. Climate change is fundamentally altering weather patterns in Kenya, causing both too much rainfall at some moments and too little at others. This year’s floods were preceded by a devastating drought the previous year. In Garissa County, Muchiri’s organization has joined several food drive appeals over the last few years to save families fleeing in desperate search for food and pasture.

And then there’s the land degradation that makes communities more vulnerable to floods, droughts, landslides and other natural disasters being intensified by climate change. In Kenya, nearly 80% of the land is eroded, nutrient-depleted, deforested or otherwise degraded. The key drivers are deforestation, overgrazing and unsustainable land use practices such as overusing fertilizers, up-down hill ploughing, and development along rivers and lakes. Farming and harvesting sand too close to the riverbanks have caused them to collapse, releasing sediment into waterways. In addition to polluting the water, the sediment increases lake levels and causes rivers to burst their banks, leading to frequent flooding.

Desertification is also intensifying due to deforestation and unsustainable land management. Once-fertile landscapes have transformed into arid deserts, threatening millions of inhabitants and severely reducing the land’s productivity.

Restoring Degraded Landscapes Offers Hope

Revitalizing this degraded landscape is paramount to improving local livelihoods, long-term food security, biodiversity conservation and climate stability. It’s also essential for building resilience to increasingly dangerous floods, droughts and other impacts of climate change.

For example, increasing tree cover through agroforestry and tree planting in degraded forests and along waterways can enhance water absorption and reduce the speed of water flow. Adopting sustainable agricultural practices such as terracing, cover cropping, mulching and cultivating across slopes also greatly reduces flood risks.

Indeed, restoration and “green infrastructure” enhances the land’s capacity to manage water effectively. Planting trees and grasses increases ground cover, intercepts rainfall, and allows more water to infiltrate the soil, reducing surface runoff and boosting water security. The roots of these plants stabilize the soil, preventing erosion. Wetlands, when restored, act as natural reservoirs that absorb excess rainwater and release it slowly, reducing the likelihood of peak flows in rivers.

Small Farmers and Local Entrepreneurs Are Key to Kenya’s Restoration

It’s people like Kiveli, Muchiri and hundreds of community organizations, small business owners and farmers who are doing this kind of work to restore the Greater Rift Valley’s denuded landscapes. Through TerraFund for AFR100, individuals receive grants, loans and equity investments, as well as training and assistance to launch restoration-focused businesses like sustainable farms or tree nurseries. Their work is essential to revitalizing Africa’s millions of acres of degraded land: Research shows that locally led restoration projects — as opposed to those run by governments or international NGOs — are 6-20 times more likely to achieve long-term success and benefit communities.

For example, Caroline Mwangi is the founder of Kimplanter Seedlings and Nursery Limited, a seedling propagation company in Ruiru in central Kenya. Kimplanter started her business in 2012, and this year, received a loan through TerraFund for AFR100 to continue land restoration projects. Her business grows trees and trains other small-scale farmers on the best climate-smart agricultural practices and how to access quality seedlings. While she lost her greenhouses, seedlings and shade nets to the recent floods, she plans to rebuild and continue the work.

Tecla Chumba, chair of the Community Social Environmental Association in Eladama Ravin, Baringo County has been rallying community members to rehabilitate the degraded Chemususu and Narasha forests using a grant from TerraFund.

“Communities hold the key to restoration,” she said. “Communities are where the real action is, where the deserts and forests are. It is where the degradation is happening. So you have to involve them in the restoration.”

They have now partnered with the organization Kenya Forest and are incentivizing community members to grow several species of trees in the forests and on their small farms.

Starting a Restoration Revolution in Kenya and Beyond

Admittedly, restoration is not the magic pill that will erase all the climate change-related problems the world faces. Nor will it alone fully protect Kenya from the kinds of floods experienced earlier this year. That will take more comprehensive efforts—from better early warning systems to more adaptation planning and finance.

However, investing in local communities and empowering them to participate in finding solutions goes a long way in forest and landscape restoration. TerraFund restoration champions say disasters such as floods and drought might set them back, but they are reminders that people need to take care of their environment. They are not giving up — even if it means starting over more than once.

But to truly restore Africa’s degraded landscapes and build resilience for a changing future, farmers, community organizations and entrepreneurs need support. Only a few hundred of the thousands of restoration champions who have applied for funding and training through TerraFund have received assistance due to limited capacity. Traditional finance is often inaccessible for small- and medium-sized restoration enterprises, with high interest rates and unsuitable repayment terms. Effective monitoring of tree growth is crucial for verifying impact and securing funding, but requires expensive tools like satellites and drones. And few governments allocate funding for restoration activities or incentivize restoration entrepreneurship, despite clear economic and public health benefits.

Despite these challenges, restoration champions like Kiveli, Mwangi and Muchiri are not giving up. They know that the young saplings they plant today will grow into trees that can make entire communities more resilient.

“We are determined to raise more than 50,000 seedlings for our next planting season,” said Muchiri.  “Slowly but surely, we shall get there.”

Caroline Njiru and Teresa Muthoni also contributed to this article.