"The wetland used to feed us, water our animals, and unite our communities. Today, our children burn charcoal because the wetland can no longer sustain us." 

That statement, from an elderly community member in the Gambella-Mara Landscape, captures a challenge that a single policy cannot resolve on its own. What is unfolding here is not simply an environmental problem Degraded ecosystems, eroded livelihoods, and weakening community cohesion drive one another in a cycle that grows harder to break with each passing season. 

The Gambella Wetland once provided reliable water, fertile grazing land, and stable conditions for communities across the area . Today, decades of encroachment, uncontrolled settlement, and overexploitation have severely altered the ecosystem. Water scarcity is now widespread. Livestock productivity has declined. Human-wildlife conflict has increased as shrinking habitats push wildlife closer to communities. And with few viable alternatives, many residents have turned to charcoal burning and small-scale riverine farming, activities that accelerate the very degradation they are trying to survive. 

A recent mapping and profiling exercise across the landscape made the scale of this interconnection visible. What it also revealed, however, was something less expected: organised, determined communities already working to reverse it. 

The Destiny Empowerment Youth Forum is running tree-planting campaigns and promoting beekeeping as an alternative livelihood. The women-led Kiremu Kaichweri group is producing honey from four beehives, yielding around 20 kilograms per hive annually, well below their potential, owing to limited technical training and persistent insecurity. Their tree nursery, once a source of both seedlings and income, has been severely constrained by water shortages since 2015. 

These efforts are modest in scale, but not in significance. They are early building blocks of livelihoods tied to a healthier landscape, underfunded and fragile, but soundly built.

The mapping exercise confirmed that community groups across the Gambella-Mara Landscape understand the problem, are willing to act, and in several cases already are. What they lack is the technical capacity, financial access, and institutional support to grow what works—and to see it taken up more widely. This is where policy has a role. Restoration in landscapes like Gambella does not fail for lack of ecological knowledge or community will. It stalls when investment in livelihoods is treated as secondary to investment in ecosystems, when in practice, the two are inseparable. 

That premise grounds the Wyss Academy's work here, as part of Hub East Africa's focus on water, wetlands, and commons: durable conservation depends on co‑created solutions that address ecological and human systems together. Working with groups like the Destiny Empowerment Youth Forum and the Kiremu Kaichweri group, and anchoring decisions in evidence from the mapping and profiling exercise, the focus is on resourcing what communities have already begun and learning what it takes to sustain and spread it. The communities of the Gambella‑Mara Landscape are already acting. What they are asking for is investment to match their effort. 

Article co-written by Joseph Ombega and Daria Vuistiner. Edited by Predrag Tripkovìc.