Rwanda's TREPA project targets 60,000 hectares with gender-responsive restoration

Rwanda's six-year Transforming Eastern Province through Adaptation project, funded by the Green Climate Fund and led by IUCN, aims to restore 60,000 hectares of drought-degraded land using a gender-responsive model placing women at the forefront. The model offers Indian investors and development finance institutions a measurable framework integrating climate adaptation with gender equality.

Rwanda's Transforming Eastern Province through Adaptation (TREPA) project, funded by the Green Climate Fund and led by IUCN, is a six-year initiative to restore 60,000 hectares of drought-degraded land into climate-resilient ecosystems. Its central design is gender-responsive, deliberately placing women at the forefront of restoration, departing from norms where men dominated technical roles. Women receive training in nursery preparation, agroforestry and soil management. Women's cooperatives manage seedling nurseries, generating income from sales, land preparation services and restoration contracts, supporting school fees and family nutrition.

Rural women and their cooperatives are the primary beneficiaries, gaining financial independence and leadership roles in landscape committees and community resource management structures. Agroforestry systems with fruit trees such as avocados improve family nutrition and reduce food expenditure. Promotion of clean, efficient cooking stoves cuts firewood-collection time for women and children, freeing hours for education and lowering deforestation. Investors and development finance institutions are positioned to deploy capital toward combined climate adaptation and gender equality outcomes through this proof-of-concept.

Investors and development finance institutions should treat the TREPA model as an applicable, measurable framework for deploying capital toward both climate adaptation and gender equality. Entities should note that women-led, climate-smart agriculture increases food security, creates reliable green value chains, and incentivises long-term community protection of restored assets, thereby lowering business and compliance risk in climate-vulnerable markets. The model demonstrates that land restoration must be twinned with social empowerment to be scalable, integrating the 'S' and 'E' components of ESG.

Key figure — Restoration target: 60,000 hectares of drought-degraded land over the six-year TREPA project