It is now well accepted that the adult vertebrate brain including the human brain is continuously generating new neurons. The idea that new neurons may play a role in neural regeneration has encouraged significant experimental work aiming at elucidating the role of these cells in brain repair after acute damage or chronic neurodegenerative diseases. The scope of the present work is to review the evidence of neurogenesis as a self-repair process following ischemic insults to the adult brain. We present an overview of the basic aspects of neurogenesis and then review the literature showing neurogenesis in the injured brain. We describe stroke and ischemia as the most common models of brain damage employed for evaluating injury induced neurogenesis and finally discuss the experimental work that has attempted to establish a correlation between endogenous and exogenous induced neurogenesis after brain injury and functional recovery. Understanding the mechanisms that regulate neural production, differentiation, migration and incorporation of new neurons into functional neural networks may provide important clues allowing the manipulation of such processes for dealing with the relevant issue of brain repair.