The goal of the project is to reduce food insecurity and improve livelihoods of poor people living in African drylands by restoring degraded land, and returning it to effective and sustainable tree, crop and livestock production, thereby increasing land profitability and landscape and livelihood resilience. The project will achieve its five interrelated objectives (listed below) through the Iterative impact pathway that directly engages with development partners to accelerate impact.

1. Lessons Learned and Best Practice (Output 1): to identify and articulate lessons learned and develop good practice guidelines for restoring productive capacity of drylands through critical review of experience at five contrasting sites in Africa, and literature on past successes and failures.
2. Proof of Application (Outputs 1, 2 &3): to obtain detailed information on the impacts of land restoration on ecosystem services and livelihoods through action research involving multiple stakeholders, providing feedback for refinement of tools for scaling up land restoration at five contrasting sites.
3. Tools, Methods and Guidelines for Scaling Up (Outputs 2 & 3): to develop and test a set of tools, methods and guidelines for scaling up successes in land restoration for profitable and sustained land management. Targeting combinations of options to local circumstances and embedding structured learning within development initiatives.
4. Tools, Methods and Guidelines for Scaling Out (Outputs 3 &4): to identify areas suitable for out-scaling based on lessons learned through the review of experience and literature and the implementation of tools, methods and guidelines in the up-scaling process. The learning process is iterative and feeds into continual refinement of these tools, methods and guidelines.
5. Knowledge management, dissemination and capacity development (Output 5): to convert the empirical knowledge generated by the program into knowledge products and make these globally available while involving all program actors interactively in knowledge development leading to knowledge exchange and capacity strengthening.