Burundi - Landscape Restoration and Resilience Project

Overview & Synopsis

Ratings of the Burundi Landscape Restoration and Resilience Project for Burundi were as follows: outcome was satisfactory; Bank performance was satisfactory; monitoring and evaluation quality was high. Lessons learned indicate that land certification is foundational for landscape restoration because it reduces disputes, builds trust, and unlocks investment in sustainable land management; this should be institutionalized early, integrated with community planning, and accompanied by sustained sensitization on women’s land rights to align practice with legal equality, thereby improving access to credit and gender inclusion. Community-driven approaches are vital in fragility, conflict, and violence settings; participatory planning for land certification and livelihoods, active inclusion of women and Batwa communities, and support for savings groups, livestock, seeds, and beekeeping strengthened ownership, productivity, and social cohesion; linking beneficiaries to markets and strengthening full value chains from production to sales are essential for durable income gains. Retaining experienced staff from prior operations and maintaining a skilled core team accelerates mobilization and delivery; continuity, adaptable design, and empowered local partners sustained implementation during shocks such as the pandemic; future projects should prioritize funding to build and retain core teams, preserve institutional knowledge, and systematically develop local partners to enhance resilience and reduce implementation risk. Community-driven, bottom-up engagement should remain central in fragile contexts, with a continued emphasis on community voice and local institutions as drivers of resilience and sustained outcomes. Nature-based solutions are viable and scalable in low-capacity contexts; Soil and Water Bioengineering (SWBE), including terracing and revegetation, reduced erosion cost-effectively, achieved high plant survival, and can be replicated across similar landscapes, with minor technical constraints addressed through local expertise. Climate and carbon co-benefits should be systematically integrated by explicitly setting carbon and resilience objectives at design, quantifying benefits using tools such as the Ex-Ante Carbon Balance Tool, and aligning with national climate commitments to facilitate access to climate finance and global partnerships.