The Great Green Wall initiative, launched in 2007, uses an integrated approach to restore a diversity of ecosystems in the North African landscape. Under this initiative, people are restoring land once rich with biodiversity and vegetation. Eleven countries in the Sahel-Sahara region—Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan—have joined to combat land degradation and restore native plant life to the landscape.

The project has faced significant challenges, including a lack of sufficient funding, inadequate coordination among countries and ongoing conflicts in the area. Still, African organizers revamped and renewed the project in 2021 with an update called the Great Green Wall Accelerator, which is designed to meet the initiative’s goals by 2030.

Land Degradation in the Sahel

In recent years, northern Africa has seen the quality of arable land decline significantly due to climate change and poor land management. Land degradation stems from human-related and natural factors, including unsustainable farming practices, overgrazing, climate change and extreme weather. Land degradation contributes to the loss of ecosystems and biodiversity; more than 9,000 plants and animal species are considered endangered as a result. Land degradation also poses serious threats to agricultural productivity, food security, and quality of life.

Nowhere is the threat of land degradation more urgent than in the Sahel, where millions of people live on land undergoing desertification, the most extreme form of land degradation. Without action to combat it, desertification will continue to drive people to migrate away from the Sahel. In 2020 alone, more than 2.5 million people in the Sahel region were displaced.

The Great Green Wall Initiative of 2007

In 2007, the African Union created the Great Green Wall initiative to combat desertification. Fundamental to this initiative is planting and growing a “wall” of trees, grasslands and vegetation to curb desertification, create new job opportunities for people in the Sahel region, increase food security and positively impact the environment by absorbing carbon that would otherwise go into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. Much of the initial funding for the project came from international and North Atlantic-based organizations, such as the World Bank and the European Union (EU).

The Great Green Wall initially targeted a smaller area, but it has expanded to include a stretch of land some 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) long, from Djibouti in the eastern part of Africa to Dakar in the west. Among other goals, today’s initiative anticipates replenishing 100 million hectares (250 million acres) of land and employing 10 million people in jobs related to the environment by 2030.

Beyond the efforts focused on planting trees, many projects fall under the Great Green Wall. The initiative uses an “integrated landscape approach” that allows each country to address land degradation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity and forestry within its local context. For example, an organization named SOS Sahel is running a Great Green Wall program to increase production of fonio—a grain that is important to local culture—to combat food insecurity and create jobs, particularly for women.

Criticisms of the Great Green Wall

Some experts criticize the Great Green Wall for its colonial origins and the narratives it promotes. Under French rule, Indigenous peoples of West Africa were forced to produce cash crops like cotton instead of traditional, more sustainable plants. This shift contributed greatly to land degradation. Indigenous farming methods, which were often sustainable, were dismissed by the colonial forces, who blamed local people for the damage to the land. A French forester popularized the term “desertification” to describe what he viewed as land degradation caused by Africans, a narrative that persists to this day. Critics argue that the Great Green Wall’s focus on desertification and funding from Western countries are the latest manifestations of neocolonialism. In 2021, President Emmanuel Macron of France pledged funding for the project, becoming one of its most prominent supporters.

In 2020, the United Nations (UN) issued a report evaluating the Great Green Wall. It found that the initiative was not on track to meet its goals by 2030. The initiative had restored less than 20% of the 100 million hectares and created only 350,000 jobs. Leaders of the program found that the main problems were structural and complained that the program had both insufficient funding and monitoring, which allowed governments to make it a low priority. War and political instability in the region contributed to the member countries’ inability to implement the strategies called for in the Great Green Wall initiative.

Great Green Wall Accelerator of 2021

Based on the UN findings, Gilles Amadou Ouédraogo, the leader of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and other leaders wrote a new plan called the Great Green Wall Accelerator. The goals of this plan were to create a monitoring system to better track progress toward the 2030 goals, analyze which projects within the initiative were working better than others, and generate greater cooperation and participation among member countries. More money has also been put into the initiative by donors, and project leaders have been tracking how the money is being used to ensure that it is directed to meeting the goals set for 2030. The Great Green Wall initiative has also spread to more countries, with 22 governments in the Sahel having committed to it.

Successes and Future of the Great Green Wall

While the Great Green Wall project has a long way to go to meet its 2030 goals, there have been modest successes. In general, countries that have shown the most commitment to the project, such as Senegal, have shown the most growth. Experts say that the success in Senegal in planting trees is a result of empowering those at the community level to get involved and feel ownership of the project. These local communities have seen an improvement to their living situations as well as improvements to the environment.

UNCCD Program Management Officer Ouédraogo, who is also a native of Burkina Faso, has hope for the future of the initiative. He says that the Accelerator plan is poised to make it possible for the project to achieve its goals. He also notes that countries are creating stakeholder organizations that will not only improve communication within each country, but will also facilitate collaboration among countries, which he believes is the key to the project’s success.