Reviving the Azuero Peninsula through Community-Driven Forest Restoration and Sustainable Farming

Landowners commonly face water shortages, low farm productivity, and increased farm input costs.

The Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI), in collaboration with Peace Corps Panama, works to identify local landowners in the Azuero region who are interested in learning and applying sustainable alternatives to conventional land use practices. These alternative practices help restore tropical biodiversity and enhance traditional livelihoods. ELTI offers field courses to Peace Corps volunteers and selected local landowners at its Panama training landscape, where they learn practical methods to implement forest restoration strategies. To complete the course, participants create a farm management plan.

Sarita Medina is a local landowner and past ELTI participant who has applied her training to implement numerous forest restoration activities in her community. She has established a shade coffee agroforestry farm, planted shade and timber trees in silvopastoral cattle ranching systems, and led reforestation efforts with the planting of 2,000 native trees on her family’s farm.   In addition, Medina, with the help of a Peace Corps volunteer and fellow ELTI past participant Christian Solis, established the first privately owned tree nursery in the community. All native saplings that Medina raises at her nursery are sold to local farmers and NGOs for reforestation projects on the Azuero Peninsula, one of Panama’s driest and most degraded regions. Empowering local landowners like Medina is a goal of both ELTI and the Peace Corps to help ensure that local people become agents of change in inspiring forest restoration for the Azuero Peninsula.

Medina, who believes that everyone has a role to play in combating climate change, says, “We need to collaborate with each other and keep reforesting. It’s time to regenerate our land and, in turn, the planet, instead of destroying it, and I want to do my part.”

by Jacob Slusser, updated December 6, 2025