Sustainable Coffee Landscapes Project — Shade-Grown Agroforestry for Watershed Protection (Burundi)

In Burundi, where about 90% of the population depends directly on natural resources and coffee provides roughly 90% of foreign-exchange earnings, decades of hillside cultivation without erosion control degraded farmland and cut coffee output from about 40,000 tonnes in the mid-1990s to 5,700 tonnes by 2003, with land degradation estimated to cost 4% of GDP a year. From 2013 to 2018 the Government of Burundi, financed by a Global Environment Facility grant channelled through the World Bank, ran the Sustainable Coffee Landscapes Project in Bubanza, Bururi and Muyinga provinces.

Farmers were trained to intercrop coffee with shade trees, bananas, beans and maize, apply terracing and other sustainable land and water management techniques, and the project supported conservation activities around the Bururi Natural Forest Reserve.

The World Bank reports more than 18,700 people benefited, with over 9,600 households — nearly half female-headed — adopting shade-grown coffee across more than 4,400 hectares brought under sustainable management. Batwa community members earned enough from forest-protection and tourism work to buy land independently for what the Bank describes as the first time in Burundi's history. The approach was then scaled nationally through the $30 million Landscape Restoration and Resilience Project, targeting 80,000 households and 90,000 hectares.

The hectare and beneficiary figures come from World Bank programme reporting rather than an independent third-party evaluation, and no separate biodiversity, carbon-stock or fire-risk data are published for the project.