Good News for Africa’s Great Green Wall

By UN Environment Programme

Women planting in the Sahel. Pho

AT THE RECENT ONE PLANET SUMMIT for Biodiversity, the Great Green Wall for the Sahel and Sahara Initiative (GGW) received $14 billion in additional funding pledges for the next ten years. This fi nancial support will scale up eff orts to restore degraded land, create green jobs, strengthen resilience and protect biodiversity. Among the fi nanciers are the Government of France, the African Development Bank and the World Bank.

Started in 2007, the 8000 kilometre-long Great Green Wall is an African-led initiative, spanning

11 countries, to combat land degradation,

desertifi cation and drought. Climate change is having a crippling impact on the Sahel, happening one and a half times faster than the global average. The region experiences droughts every two years, instead of the typical 10-year cycle.

To compound its challenges, the Sahel is also dogged by poverty, rapid population growth, high unemployment rates, food shortages and insecurity.

The Great Green wall is growing vegetation and restoring a band of land from Senegal to Djibouti to help boost food security, improve health, and create thousands of new jobs and income opportunities for the communities living there. Focus will be laid on sustainable land use, indigenous farming techniques and green jobs. The initiative has already planted billions of trees and supported tens of thousands of local households.

“The year 2021 marks the beginning of the Decade for Ecosystem Restoration – and the Great Green Wall is an inspiring example of ecosystem restoration in action. This initiative alone won’t transform the Sahel’s fortunes overnight, but it is rapidly becoming a green growth corridor that is bringing investment, boosting food security, creating jobs and sowing the seeds of peace,” said Susan Gardner, Director of UNEP’s Ecosystems Division.

UNEP, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN and the UN Convention to Combat Desertifi cation (UNCCD) are collaborating with 10 other UN agencies and Development Banks to coordinate the action in support of the GGW.

“The mobilization of this additional funding will contribute to the achievement of the Great Green Wall goals,” said Mohamed Cheikh El-Ghazouani, President of Mauritania and the Chair of Conference of Heads of State and Government of the Pan African Agency for the Green Great Wall.

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