The growing need to intensify smallholder farming systems to enhance food security for a rapidly growing population in sub-Saharan Africa constitutes a major sustainability challenge. Intensification of agriculture has often resulted in degraded, highly vulnerable, exhausted and unproductive soils. Even though smallholder farming systems are heterogeneous and dynamic, conventional approaches to improving soil management have focused on promoting one or two technologies, informed by coarse-resolution assessments, rather than tailoring technologies to context. This has resulted in technologies that have been promoted not being locally adapted. The research reported here explores the extent to which farmers' indicators of soil quality vary with land degradation status and gender and can be used in selecting locally appropriate land restoration practices. Knowledge was elicited from 150 smallholder farmers across a land degradation gradient in Rwanda through the combined use of a systematic knowledge-based systems approach, and a participatory knowledge sharing method for indicators of soil quality. The importance of matching management options to ecological context and farmer circumstances to foster adoption were revealed. There were relationships between farmers' knowledge of indicators of soil quality and their soil management practices. This research has shown that acquiring farmers' knowledge about soils can help to identify fine-scale contextual differences useful for informing the design of soil management options and it is recommended that this is done in future so that appropriate options can be offered to different farmers making them more likely to be adopted.