From Degraded Hillsides to Productive Land: Ethiopia’s Landscape Management Program

In the highlands of Ethiopia, where centuries of farming on steep slopes have stripped away topsoil and left hillsides increasingly bare, a different kind of change is now visible. Terraced fields hold moisture through the dry season. Community forests are regenerating. Farmers who once watched their land produce less each year are now investing in it. Why? Because, for the first time, they legally own it.

It all happened through the Community Action for Landscape Management Program for Results (CALM), a World Bank-supported initiative that set out to do two things at once: restore Ethiopia's degraded landscapes and secure the land rights of the people who depend on them. The results make the case that these two goals are not just compatible. They are inseparable.

A country facing a land crisis

More than half of Ethiopia's highland areas are affected by severe land degradation. Soil erosion, deforestation, and declining agricultural productivity are the daily reality for millions of smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend on land that is losing its capacity to produce. In a country where agriculture accounts for most rural employment, degraded land is a direct threat to food security, climate resilience, and economic stability.

At the same time, land tenure insecurity has long limited farmers' willingness to invest in the land they till. Without formal recognition of their rights, they have little incentive to build terraces, plant trees, or adopt conservation practices whose benefits accrue over years and decades.

CALM was designed to fix this. Using a Program-for-Results (PforR) financing instrument, which only disburses funds upon verified delivery of results, the program incentivized national ownership, strengthened land and watershed management systems, and linked financing to outcomes across 700 woredas (local subdivisions equivalent to districts).

Securing land tenure to support livelihoods

By September 2025, the results exceeded expectations on nearly every dimension.

Landscape restoration at scale. Over 2.56 million hectares have been brought under sustainable landscape management practices, including area closure, climate smart agriculture, and soil and water conservation. Approximately 3.5 million hectares are now registered under more than 6,000 legally established Community Watershed User Cooperative Societies (CWUCSs), community-governed institutions that give farmers a formal stake in the management of shared landscapes.

Land tenure secured for millions. The program issued over 8.8 million Second Level Landholding Certificates to more than 3.9 million households, securing rights over 16 million hectares of land. Over 495 woredas have been fully digitized in the National Rural Land Administration Information System, creating permanent digital records instead of paper titles vulnerable to fire and deterioration. Eighty-one percent of registered landholdings are now owned by women, either individually or jointly, a figure that reflects a deliberate and consequential shift in who holds formal rights to land in rural Ethiopia.

Livelihoods and financial inclusion. CALM generated over 1.1 million jobs across eight pathways, with women accounting for 27% and youth for 8% of total employment. Thanks to formal ownership of their land, certified landholders could access a cumulated $65 million in loans from microfinance institutions. In total, the program reached over 11.5 million beneficiaries, of whom 50% are women.

Creating a virtuous cycle

The most important lesson from CALM is also the simplest: when farmers have legal rights to their land, they invest in it. By combining land certification with community watershed governance through CWUCSs, CALM gave farmers both the legal standing to protect their land and the institutional structure to manage shared resources collectively.

The PforR instrument reinforced this logic at the national level. By only disbursing upon verified results, it required the Ethiopian government to build data systems, hire data managers and trained surveyors, and set up the verification capacities and institutional processes needed to demonstrate what was happening in 700 woredas. Those investments will outlast any single program cycle.

Gender at the center

With 81% of landholding certificates issued to women, either individually or jointly, CALM's gender outcomes are among its most consequential, changing the very structure of economic power in rural households. Women with formal land rights are more active participants in credit markets, more likely to invest in conservation, and more active as decision-makers in household financial planning. The 496,000 jobs held by women across CALM's five employment pathways deepen that shift, creating income streams that are directly tied to the restoration of the landscapes that women now formally own.

A landmark approval: CALM 2

In April 2026, the World Bank approved CALM 2, increasing the total funding to $1,025.65 million, including $200 million from IDA, $17 million from the Scaling Climate Action by Lowering Emissions (SCALE) Fund, 10 million EUR from the Nordic Development Fund, and $11.5 million from the Climate Investment Funds, Nature, People, and Climate Program (NPC).

The goal of this new phase is to make sure that the project's benefits are sustained and further developed for the millions of smallholder farmers and forest-dependent communities across Ethiopia's highlands who stand to benefit from secure land tenure, productive watersheds, and strong market linkages. IFC will work to attract private capital and reduce dependence on public and donor financing, emphasizing the development of business models that directly involve smallholder farmers and local communities and ensuring their active participation in and benefit from these initiatives.

As Africa confronts accelerating climate pressures and growing rural populations, the strategic integration of land tenure, landscape restoration, and digital infrastructure will be one of the defining governance challenges of this decade. Thanks to CALM, Ethiopia's highlands, once among Africa's most degraded, are showing what is possible when farmers own their land, manage it together, and invest in its future.