As lead implementing organisation, Climate Change Africa Opportunities (CCAO) has turned long-dismissed Indigenous knowledge into a climate strategy. In Mwenga territory, South Kivu, 660 Indigenous youth and women have replanted the host trees of edible caterpillars across 450 hectares of degraded forest. A restoration that feeds as much as it sequesters.

When the climate shifts, the forest falls silent

In Mwenga territory, Indigenous communities did not need a weather station to know the climate had changed. They read it in daily life: rainfall turned erratic, harsher heat, harvests that no longer hold. Above all, they read it in a signal no one in the region can ignore — the disappearance of edible caterpillars, a cornerstone of local diets, local trade and cultural identity.

The assessment CCAO carried out at the outset was blunt: communities perceive climate variability perfectly through its effects, but they have no instrument to quantify it and no mechanism to respond at scale. Meanwhile, pressure on the forest keeps rising. Uncontrolled logging for charcoal production — practised largely by young people for want of any economic alternative — has stripped entire forest blocks of their biodiversity.

And there lies the paradox: the solution already existed, locally. The Indigenous ancestors of Mwenga had developed practices for planting and managing caterpillar host trees that allowed the forest to feed people without being destroyed. That knowledge was demoted to the status of "poor people's knowledge", devalued for belonging to the past.

CCAO's wager: restore the knowledge before replanting the tree

That is the wager CCAO chose to make. As the organisation delivering the project — with PIFEVA (Pilier aux Femmes Vulnérables Actives) as field partner and financial support from the BASE programme of Fundación Avina — CCAO designed an intervention that imposes no imported model on the territory.

The method: anchor a nature-based solution — planting host trees for edible caterpillars — in traditional Indigenous technique, then layer on a climate rationality mechanism able to measure the intervention's real carbon effect. Ancestral knowledge supplies the species, the practice and the calendar; the climate tool supplies the evidence.

Nine villages in the Lwindi chiefdom were targeted: Irangi, Chafunda, Kabukimba, Kitale, Ilibo, Buzinda, Mulole, Lushale and Ngole — nine places where community forest remained overexploited and degraded.

What CCAO delivered

Following a pilot phase that was evaluated and then replicated at greater scale, implementation stands as follows:

• 450 hectares of community forest restored, across 9 forest blocks of 50 hectares each.
• 9 nurseries of fast-growing forest species, hosts to edible caterpillars, established and developed in the 9 target villages.
• 2 successive planting campaigns, led by the beneficiaries themselves.
• 660 Indigenous youth and women directly mobilised, trained and supported — 330 young people and 330 women.
• 4,620 family members reached indirectly through improved livelihoods.
• 11 community forest-governance structures established and supported.

These structures — one local nursery-growers' committee, one local anti-deforestation committee and nine Indigenous forest-monitoring committees — are the project's real legacy. They handle planting, maintenance, nursery expansion and surveillance of the restored forest patches, under a management plan drawn up and adapted locally.

The young people who cut, now planting

The most striking change is not a number. In this area, deforestation was largely driven by Indigenous youth acting under economic necessity. Today those same young people are on the front line of restoring the ecosystems they were helping to destroy. Charcoal production has fallen noticeably across the forests covered by the project.

The second shift concerns women. Drawing on the non-discriminatory historical knowledge of Mwenga's ancestors — practices designed to meet the needs of both men and women without destroying the forest — CCAO placed 330 Indigenous women at the centre of the project's technical and decision-making architecture. Seeing them take ownership of restoring their own community forests is a powerful qualitative indicator: greater participation by women in solving the socio-environmental problems of their own communities.

Feeding today to protect tomorrow

A host tree yields no caterpillars in its first year. CCAO drew the lesson from the pilot-phase evaluation and built in a response to that gap: without substitute income, pressure on the forest resumes long before the seedlings mature.

All 660 beneficiaries were therefore supported in setting up group-based income-generating activities, centred on fast-maturing, climate-resilient market-garden crops. The aim: absorb the immediate shock of economic crisis and food insecurity, and remove the need for households to return to cutting wood while the forest regenerates.

A documented climate benefit

The intervention was run through a climate rationality tool to test an assumption many adaptation projects overlook: an adaptation measure can itself generate greenhouse gas emissions.

Calculations on the component covering rehabilitation of degraded forest blocks through the planting of edible-caterpillar host trees establish the project as a net carbon sink. Land-use change and sequestration across the 450 replanted hectares more than offset implementation-related emissions, turning the intervention into a net negative GHG output.

What comes next

Biodiversity restoration is a medium- and long-term undertaking. The trees planted in Mwenga will produce caterpillars several years from now; the committees put in place must hold until then, and beyond. That is precisely why CCAO chose to invest as heavily in community governance as in the seedlings themselves.

The model is now documented, evaluated and replicable. It demonstrates that a nature-based solution, rooted in Indigenous knowledge and backed by rigorous climate measurement, can simultaneously restore an ecosystem, secure a protein source, generate income and sequester carbon. In Mwenga, the forest and the people who live from it are finally moving in the same direction.