A 42 sq km watershed in Yangliu Township of Baoshan Prefecture in Yunnan Province of Southwest China is the site of a pilot project that the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF) and the Baoshan Forestry Department are implementing with local villages to develop a livelihood-oriented approach to re-foresting steeply sloping lands. The project partners introduced a participatory design process for developing agroforestry technologies and land use systems that would enable villagers to stay on their land and integrate useful trees into their farms, instead of abandoning farming so that conventional re-forestation species could be planted on steep gradients to arrest soil erosion. The project has been popular and appears to have secured many benefits for the local people. The main question now confronting project implementers and sloping land conversion program officials is, how can the learning and the successes of the pilot agroforestry project be scaled up, cost-effectively, to positively impact very large numbers of people and areas of land in Southwest China?