landslides, shrinking forest reserves, soil degradation and droughts. The urgency to conserve and restore the watershed’s ecosystem services and establish resilient farming systems for sustainable local food production is huge. To tackle this challenge, mobilizing the local population is key: from farmers to policymakers. This requires a bottom-up participatory approach, in which generating intrinsic motivation, commitment and collaboration to invest in the watershed are crucial. The PIP approach has proven to do exactly that in a similar setting in Burundi: it profoundly motivates farmers to transform their reality by conscious collective action, mainly by vision and capacity building to plan for a more sustainable future. The goal of “The MWARES” is to restore resilience and stimulate stewardship of the Manafwa watershed; the PIP approach is its core cross-cutting strategy. During 4 years the project consortium (WENR, Wageningen University and 4 Ugandan partners) will work on resilient farming systems, environmental education, landscape restoration and enhanced collaboration to protect the National Park. Research at PhD level will strengthen the lessons learned, while state-of-the-art innovations will be integrated into the project to foster the required change towards resilience and stewardship of the Manafwa watershed.