Reviving Indigenous Lands With Jeji Restoration 

Restoring Degraded Lands Through Afforestation, Advocacy And Community Inclusion 

Jeji Restoration is a tree planting initiative that works closely with indigenous communities and internally displaced people affected by war and environmental conflicts to restore degraded landscapes by planting trees as a means of livelihood development. 

The project will plant 250,000 trees which will restore 500 hectares at an average density of 500 trees per hectare. This will also provide 1,000 people with income, food and shelter, 70% of which are women previously affected by war and/or environmental conflicts.

The project involves displaced people affected by war and environmental conflicts and not only members of a given community because of the significant amount of climate induced migration in Northern Nigeria that is driven by climate risks and insecurity. The purpose of this initiative is to restore indigenous lands and to provide a source of food and income to climate vulnerable communities through tree planting. 

Nigeria has the highest deforestation rate of primary forest in the world, and has lost more than half of it in the last five years due to commodity-driven logging, subsistence agriculture, and climate change. Deforestation at such a scale has triggered a number of social, economic, and environmental crises such as biodiversity loss, climate-induced migration, and the farmer-herder clashes that have cost thousands of lives and escalated conflict and insecurity. This is where the thinking of a viable long-term solution began, and why Jeji restoration was designed as a model to address the multidimensional issues of land degradation, climate migration and loss of livelihood caused, and often intensified by deforestation.

Jeji Restoration aims to restore and support climate vulnerable communities using tree planting as a financial tool to generate income thereby providing a sustainable pathway for people to plant trees and maintain their growth.

Jeji Restoration addresses a severe component of the global climate crisis, which is climate-migration often caused by land degradation and deforestation that has a direct impact on food systems, biodiversity and wildlife, water access/availability and overall human safety and wellbeing. Countries in the Sahel are experiencing an increased crisis related to climate change and resource scarcity, which poses a security threat across the region.  

Scope of Impact

Restore 500 Hectares of Degraded Forest

Plant 250,000 Trees

Provide source of income & food security to 1,000 people affected by war and environmental conflicts

Project Model

Forest Landscape Restoration

FLR seeks to restore ecological processes at the landscape scale to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem functions, and confer resilience to environmental change. FLR is far more comprehensive than conventional forest restoration approaches in analyzing local contexts and designing interventions for multiple purposes. It considers landscape objectives and the impacts of and on different stakeholders. FLR goes far beyond planting trees and simply increasing forest cover.

 

Agroforestry

Using agroforestry as a technique to restore degraded forest lands provides numerous climate and environmental benefits such improving crop productivity, increasing biodiversity and soil fertility, and reducing soil erosion. Using this technique, we work side by side with climate migrants by giving them our forest land to farm, and providing incentives to support this endeavor all in a bid to support livelihood development, income and food security.

 

Livelihood & Economic Development

Our project provides revenue generation mechanisms in different ways and through numerous initiatives, all of which are designed to integrate livelihood and economic status of locals. Through this initiative, we’ve opened up job opportunities, supported farmers with capacity building and learning tools on both agriculture and forestry extending to business management.

 

Reduced Social & Economic Inequalities

The project involves displaced people affected by environmental conflicts and not only members of a given community because of the significant amount of climate induced migration in Northern Nigeria that is driven by climate risks and insecurity. Through this initiative we provide income revenue and a form of social security to economically marginalized groups.

Community Impact Initiatives

Capacity Building

We support communities through community dialogue and capacity development program that works closely with farmers to support them on ways to adopt sustainable agricultural practices to promote resilience to climate change

Community Driven Initiatives

We make available our site during the dry season for irrigation farming of vegetables and other crops to selected beneficiaries.

Seedbank

We developed a seed bank on site in an effort to conserve seed diversity of our local indigenous crops and to create awareness of negative impact of new crop varieties and GMOs penetrating our food chains

Gov’t. Collaboration

We work closely with the state government through dialogue, partnership and consultative processes to achieve our goal.