MARENASS / Pachamama Raymi — Prize-Based Competitions for Andean Terrace and Watershed Restoration (Peru)

The Management of Natural Resources in the Southern Highlands Project (MARENASS), launched by the Government of Peru with IFAD financing in 1995, worked in the Andean highland departments of Apurímac, Ayacucho and Cusco — a region marked by pre-Columbian agricultural terraces (andenes) that had fallen into disrepair. Rather than a conventional extension-agent model, the project used the Pachamama Raymi ('Mother Earth Festival') methodology: cash-prize competitions in which families, and then whole communities, competed against each other on the quality of resource-management practices they adopted, with communities themselves controlling the resulting investment funds and hiring their own local technical specialists (yachachiq).

Total project financing was approximately US$15.14 million, of which IFAD contributed 79%, the Government of Peru 19% and participating communities the remainder, reaching 360 communities and an estimated 52,800 families. In 260 of those 360 communities, the project produced roughly 440 hectares of new agricultural terraces, 1,740 kilometres of irrigation channels, and improved irrigation on approximately 2,475 hectares — infrastructure that reduces slope erosion and increases water retention on Andean hillside farmland, alongside reported diversification of self-consumption crops and increased fodder/livestock production on the newly irrigated terraces.

IFAD's own evaluation credits the competition-based, community-controlled disbursement model with two structural effects beyond the physical works: it built a local market for paid technical-assistance services that communities could contract independently, and it reduced dependence on purchased agrochemical inputs as terrace- and irrigation-based diversification expanded on-farm food production. The methodology was subsequently adapted for other Andean natural-resource programmes.

As a caveat, the reported terracing gains are modest relative to the region's need — Peru's national terrace-adoption agency (AGRORURAL) has separately estimated that of roughly one million pre-Columbian terraces across the country, only about 30% remain usable — so MARENASS's 440 hectares of new terracing addressed a small fraction of a much larger restoration backlog, and independent, quantified erosion or yield data (beyond the project's own self-reported production diversification) were not found.

Read the full analysis: https://pachamamaraymi.org/history-iaa-peru--1