2. Building a foundation for sustainable change

Burundi is endowed with abundant rainfall, fertile arable land, and productive marshlands. With a population growth of 3.3% and with 87% of the population living from small-scale agriculture, plots have continuously become more fragmented (0.3 to 0.5 ha per household), driving farmers to further intensify production and deplete soil fertility to the limit. Farming is mainly rainfed, with staple crops like maize, beans and cassava cultivated on steep slopes with unsustainable farming practices. Expansion of farmland and dependence on wood for fuel, has pushed deforestation, with forests currently covering only 6.6% of the territory. Erosion rates in the highlands of Burundi can reach 100 tons/ha (Ndagijimana, Kessler, & Asseldonk, 2019), aggravated by increasingly more frequent torrential rains. The resulting loss of soil fertility and its effect on food security make better land stewardship by smallholders a top priority in Burundi.
It is in this context that the PIP approach was first introduced in Burundi in 2013, aiming to build a solid foundation for sustainable change towards enhanced food production and good land stewardship. The PIP approach considers that first investing in the people and the land they manage - before investing in anything else - is a precondition for sustainable change. The household level is therefore central to motivate farmers to invest in their land, but by facilitating farmer-to-farmer trainings and knowledge exchange, tackling land degradation at community and landscape level is one of the final goals (Kessler, van Duivenbooden, Nsabimana, & van Beek, 2016).
How the PIP approach works can best be visualized as in Figure 1. Just like a tree that needs fertile soil to grow strong, the PIP approach builds a foundation for sustainable change based on three principles: motivation, stewardship and resilience. This foundation, of genuinely motivated stewards of the land and its natural resources, is essential for the sustainability of any intervention or action. This is illustrated by the arrow in the trunk of the tree, which points to activities such as livestock improvement, reforestation, value chain development, water projects, and micro-credit schemes. Where this foundation is lacking, interventions will face limited ownership and often fail to achieve sustainable results (Easterly, 2006; Oino, Towett, Kirui, & Luvega, 2015).
Within the PIP approach ‘resilience-based stewardship’ is a key concept, in which these three foundation principles come together. Based on (Chapin et al., 2011), who use this concept as a framework for stewardship strategies that can increase social-ecological resilience, we define resilience-based stewardship as “motivated stakeholders who feel responsible to be good stewards of the land and its natural resources, and invest in social-ecological resilience of their landscape”. Furthermore, the blue outer circle of Figure 1 presents the three guiding principles of the PIP approach: empowerment, integration and collaboration. During implementation of any activity it is crucial (especially for project staff) to empower people, to foster integration of activities, and to enhance collaboration to scale-up faster. This mobilization of farmers to collaborate is essential to stop land degradation, and is illustrated by the branches of the tree where the process starts at household level, spreads to community level and eventually covers a whole landscape.
Creating an Integrated Farm Plan (a PIP) at household level is a key tool in the approach. This PIP creation, in which family members develop a vision and an action plan together, is a flywheel for all other changes that follow. Figure 2 gives an example of a PIP as drawn by a family, with left the current situation and right the desired future farm in 3-5 years, including erosion control measures, a diverse crop-livestock system, compost pits, a vegetable garden, and agroforestry. By creating a PIP together, awareness grows within families about the importance of integrated farm planning and limiting social and intra-household issues. These dialogues on possibilities to improve, reach attainable goals, and how to define this in a PIP, lead to better organized households with common objectives. What follows is motivated action, because a PIP is based on households’ own capabilities and knowledge, and not on project targets or objectives. These PIPs at household level are the first pieces of the required foundation for sustainable change, with further upscaling of PIP being essential to stop land degradation at village and beyond.
At village level, upscaling PIP creation takes about 2 years, with a key role for Farmer Innovators, who are (fe)male farmers – chosen by the community itself – with a progressive mind-set and spirit to improve. They are the first to create a PIP, then become PIP trainers, and through farmer-to-farmer training – mainly in competitions between organized groups – build capacities in the rest of the community; with ever more households becoming motivated stewards of their land. This is strengthened by exchange visits and the development of Village Visions, which are concrete plans for diverse collective activities, better access to markets, landscape restoration, and organized village structures. Local institutions and extension workers are closely involved in all activities, given that their motivation and genuine engagement are essential for ownership of the key elements of the PIP approach and for the sustainability of all actions.