Despite Ghana’s rapid economic growth in the last decades, high inequalities persist, notably in rural areas. The agriculture and timber sectors, both of which compete for forest land use, employ 45 percent of the workforce but at less than half the national average wage rate. Recent expansions in these sectors, however, have encroached heavily on Ghana’s forest cover, with significant negative repercussions on communities whose sustenance, livelihoods, and habitation patterns remain closely intertwined with the forest ecosystems. In 2006, wildfires alone resulted in costs amounting to three percent of Ghana’s gross domestic product. According to the World Bank, the economic cost of deforestation before 2015 was USD400 million a year. Deforestation was also by far the largest driver of Ghana’s greenhouse gas emissions.
To respond to these challenges, Ghana has joined the Climate Investment Funds’ (CIF) Forest Investment Program (FIP) in 2014. As more countries face similar challenges in fighting commodity-driven deforestation, a new Climate Deliver Initiative case study has been conducted to understand what lessons can be learned from the Ghanaian experience.
The case study focuses on Ghana’s ‘Engaging Local Communities in REDD+/ Enhancing Carbon Stocks (ELCIR+)’ project, implemented by the African Development Bank (AfDB). ELCIR+ generated outstanding and lasting results by its conclusion in 2020. A total of 49,654 ha of forests and agroforests have been secured, and livelihoods improved for 15,226 rural beneficiaries. This was achieved by sharing benefits from timber harvests with local communities and buttressing household incomes while incentivizing reforestation, notably through shaded cocoa agroforestry systems.
A distinctive feature of ELCIR+ is its focus on a multistakeholder, collaborative approach that transformed cocoa farmers into active agents of forest cover addition and Ghana’s forest agencies into agents enhancing rural incomes. “Wildfire in cocoa farms in Brong Ahafo is now reduced. Wildfires used to raze cocoa, and therefore, cocoa cultivation had been reduced in many of the areas. We now see cocoa return to Brong Ahafo. The trees in farming systems are all coming back,” said Forestry Commission Plantation Department Manager Valerie Fumey.
But the project had to overcome four main challenges. First, the pre-project preparation grant component lost early support, resulting in insufficient early-stage analytics that were crucial for such an ambitious and multisectoral approach. The team overcame this by building flexibility, testing, and analytics into the implementation phase. Second, competing interests and evolving incentive structures displaced initial beneficiary targeting approaches. The case study details how the project embraced flexibility, innovation, and bold, beneficiary-centered redesigns to still reach the right communities for maximum impact. Another challenge encountered had to do with risk and reward perceptions, with a reluctance in uptake due to the perceived costs of tree integration onto shaded cocoa farms. Technology, benefit sharing protocols, and thorough farming extension activities were effective in allaying reservations, with solutions to guarantee tree rights and stepwise implementation. Finally, the case study details the conventional but context-incongruent procedures for realignment, procurement, and financial management that were addressed through receptive action and procedural overhauls.
By and large, this project proves that ambitious multimodal interventions are worth the effort. With delivery at both the policy and practice levels, ELCIR+ proved effective in accommodating the full gamut of variables across the forest-human nexus, thereby initiating a system-wide paradigm shift that far outweighed the early complexities in design and management.
ELCIR+ is also a good example of how CIF grants allowed for the establishment of a multistakeholder, collaborative approach that will outlive the program. Coaction, aligning multifaceted and competing climate, economic, and environmental objectives, was feasible because all constituent parties had voice and agency in design and decision-making. The cohesiveness and dynamism engendered by the all-party steering community was a hallmark of the project’s success.
Most importantly, the program team focused on understanding beneficiaries, unlocking program success and sustainability. Beneficiary-centricity, including clear identification of opportunity costs and their drivers, supported by continuous feedback from end-recipients, was a crucial determinant of relevance and long-term sustainability, underscoring the case for early-stage validation via piloting, surveying, and thresholds setting.
This analysis is part of CIF’s Climate Delivery Initiative (CDI) series aimed at overcoming the operational barriers inherent to climate finance projects by building an evidence base to identify, record, workshop, and respond to delivery challenges. This informs and improves future CIF financing, and contributes to our mandate as a learning laboratory for climate finance.
The CIF-FIP funded ELCIR+ project sought to establish a sustainable human-forest symbiosis in Ghana, with measures to increase household earnings while shifting rural income generation away from dependencies on unsustainable forest-extraction, and buttressing procedures for regenerative timber harvesting, equitable timber benefit sharing, and yield-increasing agroforestry systems. This case study examines the challenges encountered, and significant wins made, in delivering this via a collaborative and ambitious all-stakeholder, multi-modal approach.