In close collaboration with the Regional Directorate of Fishing and the Blue Economy of Diana, with whom we developed an action plan for the implementation of all the activity, mutually approved and signed.

The ACReSAL project collaborates with three key ministries: Environment, Agriculture, and Water Resources. It operates across multiple institutional levels, including state, national, local, and community levels. This approach ensures that project implementers at all ministerial levels have their capacities strengthened, thereby sustaining the project's investments and efficient landscapes management.

Enhance community's capacity to manage the environment, recognizing that over 80% of environmental issues occur in rural areas. This underscores the importance of upskilling and empowering them to improve environmental management.

The integration of sustainable agriculture and landscape management practices in land restoration efforts is crucial in conserving soil and water, promoting biodiversity, and mitigating climate change. This approach also improves livelihoods, enhances ecosystem services, and builds resilience. To achieve this, we conducted thorough assessments, engaged local farmers and other stakeholders, developed context-specific plans, provided training, monitored progress, and foster policy support. This ensures a holistic and sustainable restoration of degraded lands, benefiting both people and the environment, including water resources. It's important for the community to collaborate, contribute, and learn effective environmental management approaches to ensure the project's long-term sustainability and unsustainable agricultural practices.

The project involved engaging the local community in a baseline survey to assess the hydrological conditions and the appropriate restoration approach. The survey aimed to gather information on water flow, salinity levels and mangrove health, which are necessary for designing effective hydrological restoration strategies.

Stakeholder mapping involves reviewing the diverse interests of stakeholders across various sectors at both local and national levels. This process should be as comprehensive as possible, mapping out existing influence and power structures to determine who to engage directly or indirectly. Prior to stakeholder mapping, a thorough analysis of existing policies is conducted to fully understand the issues and why they matter to the community. This understanding then informs the stakeholder mapping activity, making it clearer who to engage with.

The first step involves identifying local environmental challenges at the community level, such as water shortages, diminishing grazing areas, food scarcity, soil erosion, landslides, or flooding. NACOFA gathers community input on possible solutions and explores the links between these challenges and forest or environmental degradation.

Next, NACOFA studies the existing laws and policies that could address these issues, identifying any gaps, or determining if enhanced implementation or enforcement is needed. This process allows NACOFA to pinpoint the responsible government institutions, key officials, CSOs, partners, and community groups to collaborate with.

The purpose of this building block is to conduct thorough landscape assessments on the land owned by colleges and universities. By evaluating the environmental conditions, we can determine which species are best suited to thrive in these areas. This careful selection process ensures higher success rates for planting and contributes to more sustainable conservation efforts. The landscape assessment serves as the foundation for effective planting strategies, aligning species selection with the specific ecological characteristics of the land, ultimately leading to more resilient ecosystems.

This building block focuses on engaging directly with local communities through face-to-face interactions and site visits to every forest block. We worked closely with the community to discuss the impact of forest degradation on agriculture, livelihoods, and the natural environment. On-the-ground visits ensured a deep understanding of the issues and secured community buy-in for the program. These efforts were carried out in partnership with the Kenya Forest Service (KFS), which played a key role in validating and supporting the initiative.

The community was directly engaged during this research to gain a clear understanding of the impacts affecting them.

NACOFA and WWF-Kenya recognized the concerns raised by the community, county government, and horticulture industry regarding reduced river flow and water supply to the lake, which threatened their investments and livelihoods. A study was conducted in collaboration with Water Resource User Associations (WRUAs) in the region, revealing that the root cause of the problem was forest and landscape degradation, along with poor farm management practices in riparian areas.