Regreening Niger's Sahel, One Farmer-Pruned Stump at a Time

In the early 1980s, agronomist Tony Rinaudo discovered that the seemingly barren soils of Niger's Maradi region held a living network of tree roots and stumps that could regrow if farmers protected and pruned the shoots instead of clearing them. World Vision scaled this technique, known as Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), by training farmers rather than funding costly tree-planting programs. The approach has since regreened an estimated 5 million hectares of Nigerien farmland with roughly 200 million trees, a transformation visible from satellite imagery, while helping farmers grow more grain and diversify income from wood and fodder. FMNR has since spread to at least 24 other countries across Africa and Asia.