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

By Paul Rutebuka, Head of Preparedness and Disaster Risk Reduction, Rwanda Red Cross, as told to the Climate Centre

Karongi district, Rwanda  – A steep hillside seems like 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, one woman was living in fear. She had long known that her home needed many upgrades to withstand harsh rainy conditions, and when she first learned of the approach of El Niño, 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: communities know best what they need and what works in their context. In practice, however, there is still so much to be improved, defined, and refined with LLA programmes.

For example, the Rwandan Red Cross Society (RRCS) has encountered situations where projects move forward before sufficiently robust community-centred planning and feasibility and vulnerability analyses are in place.

In one of them, a valuable lesson concerned investing time in the integration of host and refugee communities accompanied by cash transfers to lead to stronger foundations for meaningful and lasting outcomes.

Wiser planning

Another lesson centred on ensuring that projects were planned carefully with the community. 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 programmes that have a cash element lead to larger positive benefits for recipients than those that give out cash alone.

What is powerful about these lessons is the ability to shape wiser planning and decisions.

When an Enhanced Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment was done in Rukore, the RRCS ensured that community participants were fully in charge of identifying their own priority hazards: floods, landslides, and food insecurity, and it was they who decided exactly how to meet them.

That is how one steep hillside in Rwanda became a stage for LLA. More than 400 people from all corners of the community received cash for their work, spread out across a space the size of nearly 30 soccer fields for three months: reverse-slope radical terraces, invented in the 1970s to address rainwater run-off causing devastating soil erosion and degrading water quality.

A change in resilience

Radical terraces also create a planting surface and just as radically improve food and economic security.

While the Red Cross was able to provide agronomic support, volunteers and resources, it was a community effort through and through. The project was such a success that neighbouring communities began to implement elements of the project themselves despite lacking Rukore’s support.

And the resident with her home precariously perched on the hillside in fear of El Niño?

Radical terraces helped stabilize her surroundings while the project helped to bring in resources to prepare her walls, roof and foundations for the rains ahead. She attributes her improvement in resilience to the LLA project.

This testimony of the project’s success demonstrates how cascading climate impacts can be rolled back: while rains can degrade land, erode infrastructure and reduce food security, LLA can reverse these impacts and increase economic resources to build the resilience of infrastructure.

When communities lead, they have an opportunity to not only break the chain of climate impacts but also boost their own resilience.

(Artwork by Rebeka Ryvola)