Yaw Gyabeng’s – River bank restoration at Elluokrom, Ghana

Yaw Gyabeng, a rice farmer at Elluokrom in the Juaboso-Bia landscape in Ghana, has changed a common traditional practice of clearing river and stream banks for farming. For about a decade, farmers had held the belief that stream and riverbanks would be more productive than other areas and therefore ignored any customary and statutory laws to conserve vegetative buffer zones of water bodies. Despite criticism of other village members, Yaw decides to restore and respect the buffer zone along rivers.