Bare Gullies in Ethiopia's Rift Valley Stitched Shut by 800 Farmers With Grass and Bamboo

The Halaba Zone in Ethiopia's Rift Valley has lost around 15,000 of its 99,000 hectares to land degradation, according to local authorities. The SMILE project (Sustainable Land Management for Improved Livelihoods in the Ethiopian Rift Valley), run by Hawassa University, the International Water Management Institute and the University of Aberdeen with the Halaba zonal agriculture office, supports about 800 farmers across eight kebeles. They use check dams, bunds, native grasses, bamboo, and fodder and fruit trees to restore roughly 12 kilometers of degraded land, and grass is returning to ground that was bare. 120 young people and women were also trained and equipped to run six beekeeping and 18 goat-fattening enterprises, and the project notes that larger gullies still need investment beyond what communities can do alone.