Climate action blog: Rwanda’s ‘radical terraces’ boost economic and food security

By Rebeka Ryvola, Climate Centre

(This is the first in a series of three blogs by the Climate Centre in the run-to the Climate Action Summit this Wednesday 16 September.)

Karongi district, Rwanda  – A steep hillside seems like it would be a complicated place to call home, and yet that is where about half of Rwandans live. This is the reality of the land of a thousand hills, le pays de mille collines.

In one hillside village, Rukore, a woman was living in fear. She had long known that her home needed many upgrades to withstand harsh rainy conditions for much longer, and when she learned of the upcoming El Niño season, projected to bring harsh and persistent rain and potentially landslides, she was filled with dread. She didn’t know that brighter days, figuratively speaking, also lay ahead.

Locally led adaptation (LLA) as a concept makes sense: of course communities know best what they need and what would work in their context. In practice, however, there is still so much to be improved, defined, and refined with the implementation of LLA programmes.

For example, the Rwandan Red Cross Society (RRCS) has encountered situations where projects moved forward before sufficiently robust community-centred planning and feasibility and vulnerability analyses were in place. In one such experience, a valuable lesson was around investing time in the integration of host and refugee communities alongside cash transfers in order to lead to stronger foundations for meaningful and lasting outcomes.

Another centred on ensuring that projects were planned carefully with the community. Paul Rutebuka, RRCS Head of Preparedness and Disaster Risk Reduction, says: “If you don’t involve communities in initial project design, from the very start, the project will not be successful. Just giving resources doesn’t work”

A 2024 CGIAR meta-analysis also found that cash plus programmes lead to larger positive benefits for recipients than programmes that give out cash alone.

What is powerful about these lessons are the ability to shape wiser planning and decisions. When Rukore was taken through an Enhanced Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment, the RRCS ensured that community participants were fully in charge of identifying their own priority hazards: they chose floods, landslides, and food insecurity, and they were the ones to decide exactly how to meet these hazards.

That is how one steep hillside in Rwanda became a stage for LLA: 400-plus people from all corners of the community, all receiving cash for their work, spread out across an expanse the size of 28 soccer fields for a three months run, created something called radical terraces.

This reverse-slope bench hillside terracing technique was invented in the 1970s to address rainwater runoff from causing devastating soil erosion and degrading water quality. Radical terraces also create a planting surface; they can, in fact, radically improve food and economic security as well.

While the RRCS was able to provide agronomist support, volunteers, and resources, it was a community production through and through for the full three-month run. The project was such a success that neighbouring communities began to implement elements of the project in their own communities, despite lacking Rukore’s external resources, technical support, and recipient accountability.

And the resident with her home precariously perched on the hillside, in fear of the fast approaching El Niño? Radical terraces helped stabilize the surroundings, while the project helped to bring in enough resources to prepare her walls, roof, and foundation for the rains ahead. She attributes her change in resilience to the LLA project.

This testimony of project success demonstrates how cascading climate impacts can go both ways: while rains can cause land degradation, infrastructure erosion, and a reduction in food security, LLA can reduce erosion, increase food security, and increase economic resources to further build up infrastructure resilience as well. When communities lead, they have an opportunity to not only break the chain of climate impacts, but to compound their own resilience.

(Artwork by Rebeka Ryvola)