Margaret Opoku, 61, walks the rows of her farm in Darso Community, in Ghana's Offinso North District, and gestures at what surrounds her. "Now my farm has become like a forest," she says, "as you can see."
Opoku’s land is thick with trees she planted herself — some already over four years old — along with plantain she intercropped for shade. When a field team from the environmental NGO EcoCare Ghana visited the site in July 2023, a field officer paused mid-step. "A single woman can single-handedly plant this," he said. "She did all of this restoration herself. It's impressive. Very impressive."
Her path to those trees runs through a harder chapter. For years, Opoku had grown maize on this same land and watched her yields steadily drop. "My yield declined from three trucks full to one," she says. Neighbors advised her to leave the land fallow and let the soil recover. She did. Then she heard that EcoCare, a partner in our TerraFund for AFR100 restoration program, was distributing seedlings to farmers willing to grow them on their own land. She took some.
What the Trees Did to the Soil
The change Opoku observed was gradual and then undeniable. "When I planted the trees, the soil became more moist, with more nutrients than before," Opoku says. "I planted some plantain, and they are all doing well, so I can say that the trees have really helped me."
What she experienced is what agroforestry is designed to do. Deep-rooted trees draw moisture upward and cycle nutrients back into the soil that annual crops have depleted over time. Plantain adds canopy, the canopy retains that soil moisture, and the productive capacity of the land — rather than narrowing year over year — begins to expand again. For farmers working on smallholder plots in Ghana's cocoa belt, where soil degradation from decades of monoculture has reduced yields across the region, the model represents a material and practical alternative. Not a conservation gesture, but a recovery strategy.
Ghana's Transition Landscape — the fertile middle ground between the country's high forests and savannah — has long been considered the nation's food basket. The smallholder farming communities of Offinso and Techiman have built their livelihoods around it for generations, and the land's continued productivity is the foundation of those livelihoods. Excessive agricultural expansion, increasing demand for fuelwood and charcoal, bush fires, and uncontrolled logging have degraded the landscape significantly, and the downstream effects of climate change — soil compaction, erratic rainfall, and the proliferation of pests and diseases — have compounded those pressures, pulling down yields even as the communities who depend on them have few alternatives.
EcoCare Ghana has been working to reverse that trend. In partnership with One Tree Planted and funded through TerraFund for AFR100 — the landscape restoration initiative that channels financing toward locally led projects across the continent — EcoCare's five-year Community-Led Restoration Project has achieved 350,540 trees planted across 226 hectares of degraded farmland and fallow land within five communities in the Transition Landscape, running from 2022 to 2026. Its ambitions go beyond tree cover: restoring indigenous species endemic to the area, improving water quality along degraded waterways, rebuilding soil structure to support better crop yields, and creating jobs for women and youth in communities where rural-urban migration is an increasing reality.
The agroforestry model is central to how those numbers are meant to hold. Restoration that gives communities a stake in the trees' survival — through improved soil, new crops, and diversified income — is restoration built to endure.
From Four Members to Thirty-Eight
Opoku understood this intuitively. Once her own land had responded, she started talking to her neighbors. "When we started, we were just four members," she says. "I advised and convinced more farmers, making us 38 members — 12 women — who are practicing agroforestry on their farms."
Thirty-eight farmers, 12 of them women, in a single community, brought in not by a government or NGO program officer but by a 61-year-old woman who had let her maize fields fallow, taken a chance on free seedlings, and watched her land come back. The field team, walking her rows, called it women-led. It is also something harder to categorize: the kind of peer-to-peer knowledge transfer that formal restoration programs spend years trying to replicate and rarely can engineer.
“Her success in the restoration activities stands as a powerful reminder that environmental restoration is not just about land,” says project manager Enock Okyere of EcoCare Ghana. “But it is about leadership, resilience, and vision. Transforming degraded land into a thriving forest reflects not only technical success, but a deep commitment to sustainability and community impact.”
Okyere says Opoku has redefined the possibility of what it means to reverse the adverse impacts of climate change by demonstrating that, “with determination and well-coordinated stewardship, even the most damaged ecosystems can be brought back to life.”
Large-scale projects are tracked in hectares and headcount, in trees planted and survival rates and jobs created. Those numbers matter. But what they tend not to capture is the moment when a single farmer's decision becomes her community's, or when a woman who once harvested one truckload of maize from land that used to yield three stands in the shade of trees she planted herself and says, with some satisfaction, that it has become like a forest. In the Atewa transition landscape — where the forest feeds five million people, and the land around it is still finding its way back — that is not a small thing to witness.
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