The project “Sustainable Land Management in target landscapes of Central Angola (GCP/ANG/055/GFF)” aims at reversing negative land degradation trends in selected landscapes in Central Angola by combining sustainable and rational approaches to planning, decision-making and land-use management with participatory approaches to build the capacity of local stakeholders. Implemented by FAO in partnership with the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Environment (MINAMB), the project has a 4-year implementation period (2020-2024).

Angola faces a major threat of degradation to its land and ecosystems which results from high population growth, poor land use and poor natural resource management. People living in rural areas are further affected by poverty, illiteracy, and limited access to social services. Despite having a rich reserve of natural resources of oil, gas and minerals, agriculture is the most common economic activity carried out in Angola. But the sector’s potential is limited by its unreliability, low productivity and environmental unsustainability. 

The Government of Angola is therefore interested in improving the sustainability and productivity of small-holder farming, and using this as a strategy for contributing to food security and fighting rural poverty, whilst reducing its overdependence on the oil sector and food imports. However, the country faces important capacity-related barriers to achieve such goals, namely; i) limited systemic, institutional and individual capacity for complex and geo-based data handling, ii) significant gaps in the capacity for optimal land-use allocation/management and the application of on the ground of tools and concepts relating to Sustainable Land Management (SLM) and iii) insufficient institutional capacity in financial leverage for scaling up SLM technologies and approaches.

The GEF-funded project “Sustainable Land Management in target landscapes of Central Angola” (GCP/ANG/055/GFF) attempts to address these barriers with the objective of reversing negative land degradation trends in selected landscapes in Central Angola by combining sustainable and rational approaches to planning, decision-making and land-use management with participatory approaches to build the capacity of local stakeholders. Interventions are foreseen in three main components.

Through Component 1, the project will build national capacity for land-use management through Agroecological Zoning (AEZ) and environmental monitoring with a focus on land degradation to support the national LDN process. More specifically, the project will, through Component 1, develop a dedicated AEZ Unit focused on outputs which are useful for SLM and will in turn develop a fine-scale and integrated decision-support system (DSS) for guiding SLM, based on the LRMIS approach. During its operations, the AEZ Unit will capacitate different types of beneficiaries in a “learning by doing” approach, who in turn will support the unit’s operations while being trained in a module-based training program.

Under Component 2, the project will support the integration of SLM into rational decision-making pertaining to land-use management, both at the municipal/commune level and at the local level (i.e. village/community) through working with municipal and communal authorities, as well as supporting local communities in the application of practical SLM through Farmer Field Schools on topics such as sustainable land-use allocation, crop suitability, fire prevention, integrated soil fertility management, as well as other SLM techniques and science-based approaches. It will target both agricultural and pastoral land uses, making use of agroecological data and tailored AEZ products developed by the AEZ Unit.

The project’s Component 3 will focus on identifying and developing suitable options for SLM finance and on improving national capacity for mobilizing resources to be invested in SLM. This will include both carrying out and disseminating targeted economic analysis of the cost of land degradation in the provinces of Huambo and Benguela among key decision makers, and presenting alternatives to create added economic value through the development of value chains that promote SLM.

By learning from previous GEF SLM projects and working synergistically with existing ones, the FAO-GEF project will build on a solid baseline of relevant initiatives to develop plans for scaling-up the monitoring system’s capacity, reach and scope of services to sustain the operations of the AEZ Unit in its support of SLM and the LDN process beyond project end.

The project aims to develop and test different interrelated strategies that reenforce each other through different institutional processes and information flows between the outputs of its three components. The general approach will be tested and developed in the provinces of Huambo and Benguela and, in the medium term, extended to other provinces in the country, using the national network of Agro-Ecological Centers as intermediate elements between the central technical unit and local extension initiatives.