Offering: African Living Labs and Ecosystem Restoration Expertise

Chuka University offers an African platform for co-creating, testing and scaling ecosystem restoration solutions with European partners.

We can contribute African living-lab environments, community and stakeholder partnerships, scientific expertise and field-based implementation capacity across agricultural landscapes, watersheds, wetlands, forests, rangelands and coastal ecosystems. Our expertise includes ecosystem restoration, Nature-Based Solutions, biodiversity conservation, sustainable land and water management, climate resilience, ecosystem services, Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES), soil and blue carbon, carbon MRV, ecotourism and cultural heritage.

Chuka University can support the full pathway from co-design and field testing to monitoring, evaluation, learning and scaling. We can work with communities, government agencies, practitioners and other local actors to identify restoration priorities, test solutions under real-world conditions, understand implementation barriers and generate evidence on ecological, social and livelihood outcomes.

Our contribution is not intended to be one-way. We seek genuine EU–Africa co-creation and two-way knowledge exchange. European partners can bring technologies, methodologies, research approaches and restoration innovations for testing and adaptation in African contexts, while Chuka University and its partners can contribute African experience, locally developed solutions, community knowledge, implementation lessons and evidence that can inform restoration approaches and practice in Europe.

This exchange can help identify which restoration approaches are transferable across contexts, which require adaptation, and what institutional, social, technical and financial conditions are needed for successful implementation and scaling.

Chuka University can also contribute expertise at the interface of ecosystem restoration, cultural heritage and sustainable tourism, creating opportunities for living labs where natural and cultural landscapes are protected together with community livelihoods.

We are particularly interested in collaborating with European universities, research institutions, NGOs, public authorities, restoration practitioners, heritage organisations, tourism organisations and innovation partners developing HORIZON-NATURE proposals focused on living labs, implementation bottlenecks, resilience, networking and scaling.

We invite EU partners to work with Chuka University to establish practical EU–Africa living labs that generate knowledge in both directions: adapting European innovations to African realities while bringing African evidence, innovations and lessons into European restoration practice.