The Nile Basin Development Challenge (NBDC) aimed to improve the resilience of rural livelihoods in the Ethiopian highlands through a landscape approach to rainwater management. At the end of the Challenge, the team distilled insights, findings and experiences into eight key messages which, taken together, contribute to  new water and land management paradigm that enables poor smallholder farmers improve their food security, livelihoods and incomes while conserving the natural resource base.

The paradigm is introduced in this digital story:

You can also view each key message as a separate (and different) digital story:

1. Empower local communities and develop their leadership capacities to achieve long-term benefits and sustainable outcomes.
2. Integrate and share scientific and local knowledge and encourage innovation through ‘learning by doing’.
3. Strengthen and transform institutional and human capacities among all stakeholders to achieve the potential benefits of sustainable land management.
4. Create, align and implement incentives for all parties to successfully implement sustainable innovative programs at scale.
5. Adapt new models, learning and planning tools and improved learning processes to increase the effectiveness of planning, implementation, and capacity building.
6. Integrate multiple rainwater management interventions at watershed and basin scales to benefit rainwater management programs.
7. Attend to downstream and off-site benefits of rainwater management as well as upstream or on-farm benefits and costs.
8. Improve markets, value chains and multi-stakeholder institutions to enhance the benefits and sustainability of rainwater management investments.

Download the brief with all the messages.

Read the full technical report “A new integrated watershed rainwater management paradigm for Ethiopia: Key messages from the Nile Basin Development Challenge, 2009–2013“

Read the Nile Basin summary

The NBDC was implemented by a consortium led by the International Livestock Research Institute and the International Water Management Institute. It was funded by the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF).