Experts and community leaders from across the world have gathered in Nairobi for the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) Africa 2025, to explore opportunities for the continent to reverse land degradation, biodiversity loss and the climate crisis.

Focusing on how nature can power Africa’s present and future, GLF Africa 2025 will be staging its seventh edition titled ‘Innovate, Restore, Prosper’, which brings together leading voices from diverse sectors and backgrounds.

The June 19, 2025, high-powered one-day event at the Centre for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) headquarters in Gigiri will spotlight Africa’s progress, priorities and possibilities in building healthy, resilient and prosperous landscapes, communities and economies.

Hosted by GLF and CIFOR-ICRAF, the event will cover four key themes – forest and landscape restoration, land and tree use rights and livelihoods, natural capital and sustainable finance, and AI, technology and data for intelligent landscapes.

The Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) is the world’s largest knowledge-led platform on integrated land use, connecting people with a shared vision to create productive, profitable, equitable and resilient landscapes.

It is led by CIFOR-ICRAF, in collaboration with its co-founders UNEP and the World Bank, and its charter members.

GLF is dedicated to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Climate Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (the universal masterplan to halt and reverse biodiversity loss), and is committed to the landscape approach.

Unlocking potential

This year’s event is focused on building Africa’s natural economy. Africa faces a triple environmental crisis of land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change, but current policies, funding and land rights fall short of what’s needed.

Time is running out to tackle these challenges, which is why the continent must start building a powerful nature economy today.

This means unlocking its vast natural capital – its forests, biodiversity, land and water – combined with deep knowledge systems, good governance, meaningful partnerships, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, according to the GLF.

The 2025 GLF Africa event in Nairobi event features more than 60 inspiring speakers, including Balbina Andrew, Tanzania Indigenous community leader, the executive director of Nourish Africa and coordinator of the locally-led initiative GLFx Mwanza, and Kate Kallot, founder and CEO of Amini AI, recognised for expanding access to technology across Africa and named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI.  

Other speakers are CIFOR-ICRAF Africa Director Peter Minang, who is an expert in climate-smart landscapes, and Ngobi Joel, co-founder of the School Food Forest Initiative, a 2025 GLF Forest Restoration Steward and activist focused on climate, education and rural development in Uganda.  

Rekia Foudel, founder and managing partner of Barka Fund, one of the GLF’s 8 Women with a New Vision for Earth 2025, bringing innovative financing to African start-ups, will also speak at the forum, as will Sellah Bogonko, co-founder and CEO of Jacob’s Ladder Africa, working to activate 30 million green jobs across Africa by 2033.  

Solange Bandiaky-Badji, president of the Rights and Resources Group (RRG) and coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), who spearheaded RRI’s Gender Justice programme, is also among the speakers.   

These leaders will be joined by many other change-makers in youth-led action, research, storytelling, academia, gender equity, sustainable finance and policy to discuss topics such as powering Africa’s future and the promise of nature-centred economies.

Participants will also discuss confronting challenges to secure rights, land restoration and livelihoods, as well as scaling up farmer-managed natural regeneration with examples of action in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Other topics include bridging knowledge domains for inclusive landscape restoration, financing frontline action for climate, nature and livelihoods, how Africa can lead agri-tech transformation, and from vision to action – a roadmap for Africa’s nature economy.

Alongside GLF Africa 2025, the GLF will engage youth and local leaders from across the continent in collaborative in-person experiences during the Africa Restoration Week from 20-21 June, Stakeholder Engagement with Evidence training (23-25 June) and earlier, between 16 and 18 June, holding a Landscape Leadership Camp.

Financing frontlines

The workshops, interactive learning and peer networking are expected to bridge community experience, scientific research and regional insights on policy, evidence-based restoration action, inclusive decision-making, landscape approaches, breaking silos, climate justice, and fundraising.

The session ‘From risk to resilience: Financing frontline action for climate, nature and livelihoods’ will make for an interesting conversation. Today’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) finance frameworks are still largely focused on screening out risk.

But they are not enough to tackle the climate emergency. The session will therefore call for radical thinking of sustainable finance – one that shifts capital flows to the frontlines, where they can support locally-led solutions for climate resilience, ecosystem restoration and improved livelihoods.  

Trailblazers turning ESG and impact investing into tools for regeneration, inclusion and sustainability demonstrate how finance can help in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by investing in smallholder farmers, rural communities and landscape restoration.

Experiences and strategies in scaling up farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) through action in Ethiopia and Kenya highlighting the role of communities, governments and development partners, will be discussed through insights from the FMNR Scaling Manual and WV International’s atingi e-learning module.

Through case representations, dialogue and reflection, the session will identify key opportunities, challenges and enablers to grow FMNR across Africa to advance forest and landscape restoration goals based on these East African case studies.

Another session will explore how African-led tech solutions are reshaping agri-food systems to be smarter, more inclusive and adaptive to today’s challenges.

Panellists will share solutions that integrate AI and technology with traditional knowledge to develop real-world solutions for local ecosystems.

Leading African women innovators and practitioners at the intersection of digital transformation and sustainable development are not just imagining the future – they are building it, say the GLF Africa 2025 organisers.

“In a world where science is questioned, facts politicised, and AI can distort the truth, whose knowledge shapes our future?” they ask, answering that from ancestral wisdom and oral traditions to satellite date and youth experience, knowledge exists in many forms, yet all too often some forms are ignored dismissed, or forgotten”.

An interactive session will challenge this imbalance—exploring how diverse knowledge systems can co-exist, contest, and enrich one another.   

Drawing on lessons from Regreening Africa, the Great Green Wall, and beyond, discussions at the forum will examine how to build trust, legitimacy, and innovation across knowledge domains to drive inclusive, large-scale landscape restoration in a rapidly changing world.

CIFOR-ICRAF CEO and Director-General Eliane Ubalijoro will distil key messages from GLF Africa 2025’s discussions on what is next for Africa’s natural economy in developing a roadmap to scale up a new development model for the continent.  

It will be an investable, people-centred, tech-supported roadmap to scale up Africa’s natural economy and create millions of jobs for communities across the continent.

The forum will serve as a platform to learn about Africa’s growing landscape restoration movement, the tools, partnerships and innovations needed to turn the continent’s restoration and nature economy goals into a reality – from blended finance and impact investment to AI and local upscaling.