I am currently participating in a restoration learning program with Natural State, which continues online until August and includes two weeks of in-person training in Lolldaiga, Laikipia County, Kenya. The training brought together around 40 practitioners working on restoration across Africa, including participants from Cameroon, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Namibia.

I joined the program to deepen my understanding of nature restoration, strengthen my ability to design effective restoration projects, and build practical facilitation skills for restoration planning. What made the experience particularly valuable was its combination of ecological concepts, facilitation techniques, and structured approaches to strategy development. All of these concepts are directly relevant to Cadasta’s work on land rights and conservation in the Congo Basin and beyond.

A key takeaway for me is that restoration is not simply about improving what we can see in the landscapes. It is about rebuilding entire systems. This includes restoring composition (the diversity of species present), structure (how ecosystems are physically organized, including soil, vegetation, and water systems), and function (the ecological processes that sustain life, such as nutrient cycling, water flow, and species interactions). Looking at these three dimensions together provides a much clearer understanding of whether restoration efforts are truly effective.

At the same time, the training reinforced that restoration is not only ecological but also deeply social. For any project involving communities to succeed, communities must understand the project, see the value of their participation, and clearly understand what they will gain from the implementation. This is very relevant to our work at Cadasta, especially in the Congo Basin, where land rights, community participation, mapping, and conservation outcomes are closely connected. Our work is stronger when communities are not only beneficiaries but active participants in defining the problem, validating information, and shaping the solutions.

I also learned practical facilitation techniques that can directly strengthen how we work with partners, communities, and government stakeholders. Good facilitation is not about imposing answers, but about creating the right process for people to contribute meaningfully and make better decisions together. The facilitation module emphasized skills such as clear communication, reading the room, creating a safe space, sparking the mind, managing conflict, keeping discussions on track, and documenting outcomes.

These facilitation skills are highly applicable to the participatory mapping and community validation work we do at Cadasta. Creating a safe space helps ensure that women, youth, Indigenous Peoples, local leaders, and quieter participants can all contribute. Sparking reflection through good questions can help communities consider land use, threats, benefits, and long-term priorities more deeply. Conflict management is also essential, especially when discussing boundaries, overlapping claims, or competing land uses. Keeping discussions on track and properly documenting outputs can help us move from community dialogue to clear, usable project records, validation reports, maps, and decision-making documents.

Another important lesson was the value of strong strategy planning. A good strategy starts with understanding the current situation before jumping into activities. The planning process includes assessing the current situation, defining the desired impact, and planning the work needed to achieve it. This means identifying the biodiversity target, the threats affecting it, the behaviors driving those threats, and the influences behind those behaviors. This approach is useful to us because it helps connect our activities to real impact rather than focusing only on outputs.

For Cadasta, this strategy planning approach can help us strengthen project design, monitoring, reporting, and communications. In the Congo Basin and beyond, we can more clearly demonstrate how secure land rights, participatory mapping, and community-generated data contribute to broader outcomes such as reduced conflict, improved governance, better conservation planning, and stronger community stewardship of land and natural resources. It can also help us communicate more clearly with donors by showing the logical link between the current situation, the threats or challenges, the behaviors we are helping to change, and the long-term impact we want to support.

Overall, this experience reinforced the relevance of Cadasta’s approach within the restoration and conservation space. Cadasta’s strength is that we can help connect people, land, data, and decision-making. By combining strong facilitation, community participation, GIS, and better strategy planning, we can make our work in the Congo Basin and beyond more impactful, more sustainable, and easier to communicate to partners and donors.