"What was once an open and degraded space is now a thriving green zone, protecting biodiversity and supporting ecosystem restoration. The restoration work is not just about today, but about securing long-term stability, productivity, and health of the wetland and its people." — Caroline Ouko, CETRAD 

That shift did not happen overnight, and it did not happen through a single intervention. It happened because the people working to restore the Gambella Wetland understood something that took time to learn: restoring the wetland meant looking well beyond it.

The Gambella Wetland sits along the Waso Mara River at the boundary of Meru and Isiolo Counties, fed by natural springs believed to draw from underground seepage originating in the Nyambene forest. It drains into the larger Ewaso Ng'iro North River and ultimately into the Lorian Swamp. For communities across this arid and semiarid region, it has historically been far more than a water source. It provided continuous surface water through dry seasons, supported irrigated agriculture, sustained biodiversity including Phoenix reclinata palms, reeds, crested cranes, and served as a critical grazing reserve during prolonged droughts. 

Over time, that functionality eroded. Settlement expansion, deforestation, overgrazing, and increasingly frequent extreme weather events degraded the wetland progressively. Governance gaps allowed encroachment to accelerate. What had been a woody grassland rich in biodiversity became a fragmented landscape struggling to perform the ecological and livelihood functions it once provided reliably. 

When CETRAD and the Wyss Academy began restoration work in 2023, the first and most important insight was also the most counterintuitive. A restoration approach targeting only the wetland itself would not work. In the upper catchment—the higher land feeding the wetland—forest loss and agricultural expansion had left less vegetation to hold the rain, so more water ran off the land, stripping soil and carrying sediment down into the wetland. Fixing the wetland without addressing those upstream pressures would be like treating symptoms while leaving the cause untouched. 

The programme was therefore designed at landscape scale, combining direct restoration interventions with efforts to remediate the effects of adjacent land uses and address the underlying drivers of degradation. Governance strengthening was built into the approach from the start, using and reinforcing existing structures rather than bypassing them. 

At the heart of the restoration effort is native tree planting along the riparian zone. Over 5,000 indigenous trees have been planted to date, selected through a process that combined scientific assessment with the knowledge of community elders who remembered the species that once defined the Gambella landscape. That combination proved critical: ecologically sound species selection grounded in lived memory of what the wetland had once been. 

A community nursery now supplies seedlings for ongoing planting cycles. Scouts monitor and protect planted seedlings. An inventory of indigenous species suitable for floodplain and riparian restoration has been developed. Community leaders have been identified and trained to champion restoration within their own networks. And the County Environment Committees of both Meru and Isiolo have been engaged to establish formal mechanisms for securing and governing the wetland long term. 

Partners in this work include Kenya Forest Service, Kenya Wildlife Service, NEMA, the Water Resources Authority, LAPSSET, ENNDA, and the county governments of Meru and Isiolo. 

The Gambella experience points to something broader about how restoration works in practice. It is not a single discipline or a single intervention. It requires coordinating across ecology, governance, livelihoods, and community knowledge simultaneously, with a shared goal that all stakeholders can recognise and commit to. 

The Wyss Academy's approach in this landscape reflects exactly that. Durable restoration outcomes require working across systems, not within silos—and investing in the governance structures that will sustain those outcomes long after the planting is done.