Facilitating Co-Creation through a Living Lab Approach in the GALILEO Project

Agroforestry is often presented as a powerful response to food insecurity, climate change, and ecosystem degradation in Sub Saharan Africa. But in practice, success is not driven by technologies alone. What truly makes agroforestry work is people, their knowledge, their priorities, and their ability to shape solutions that reflect everyday realities.

In GALILEO project, co creation is not treated as a simple first step. It is the starting point for lasting change. By engaging communities from the outset, building shared understanding, identifying priorities together, and working towards concrete results, Living Labs become places where innovation grows from collaboration rather than transfer. Trust, local ownership, and long term resilience are at the heart of this process.

This is the ambition behind GALILEO’s eight plus one Living Labs in Senegal, Ghana, Cameroon, and Kenya. These are not controlled experimental sites. They are living landscapes, farms, villages, and territories, where farmers, researchers, policymakers, and private actors come together to jointly design, test, and scale agroforestry solutions that can endure.

1. Entering the Community: Trust as the First Step

In GALILEO project, every Living Lab journey begins with community entry. Researchers and facilitators take the time to listen, connect with local authorities, and clearly explain the project’s scope and intentions. This moment is not about starting activities, but about building mutual respect and transparency from the outset. It reflects GALILEO’s understanding that trust is just as important as technical solutions. Without this foundation, genuine co creation cannot take place.

2. Building a Common Understanding of Context

At the heart of GALILEO project Task 1.1 is the goal of building a shared understanding of the agro ecological and socio institutional context of each Living Lab. Rather than working from assumptions, the task focuses on grounding activities in local realities through a combination of approaches:

• Diagnostics and field visits to observe and document soils, cropping systems, biodiversity, and farm structures

• Key informant interviews and focus groups to capture farmers’ perspectives, institutional histories, and existing local innovations

• Cross analysis between sites, allowing each Living Lab to learn from experiences across different African contexts

This ensures that when co creation begins, farmers, scientists, and policymakers all work from the same shared understanding and baseline knowledge.

3. Identifying Challenges Together

The diagnosis highlights challenges that are widely shared, yet shaped by local contexts and realities:

• Declining soil fertility and rainfall variability in Sahelian zones

• Land tenure and tree ownership issues in cocoa landscapes

• Erosion and market gaps in Kenya’s highlands

Rather than presenting a top-down list, GALILEO emphasizes joint prioritization during the LL inception workshop. This way, the challenges addressed are those that matter most to local actors and can realistically be overcome.

4. Producing Outcomes Through Engagement

Co creation in GALILEO project focuses on generating both tangible and intangible outcomes that strengthen engagement and foster local ownership. In practice, this includes:

• Organising inception workshops where a shared vision and common goals are defined together

• Encouraging commitment from all actors by making progress visible, concrete, and inclusive

• Setting up experimentation and demonstration plots in close collaboration with farmer groups

Each milestone, whether small or large, helps build trust and keeps the momentum going.

5. Co-Creation as an Orchestrated but Flexible Process

In GALILEO project, co creation is understood as a seven-step journey that moves from context analysis to innovation design, experimentation, evaluation, and reflexivity. At the same time, the process is deliberately flexible. Each Living Lab adapts the journey to its own local history, institutions, and social dynamics.

This way of working provides structure without rigidity. It preserves methodological consistency while allowing the space needed to respect community rhythms and local ways of working.

While co-creation processes continue within each country, it is equally important to create space for mutual learning across the Living Labs involved in the GALILEO project.