Lack of communication, funds, and coordination are among the greatest challenges the Great Green Wall Initiative has encountered, 15 years after its launch by the African Union to combat desertification in the Sahel.
Speaking at the COP15 meeting in Abidjan, participants still believe the Great Green Wall project is the African continent’s biggest chance at combatting desertification, if the process would only pick up the pace.
“Right now, at the field level, the poor are still waiting…and they have been waiting for a long time,” says Paul Ouedraogo, vice executive secretary for CILSS, the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel.
“We don’t really need to spend a long time with all the processes. We have a lot of knowledge in Africa,” he told RFI on the sidelines of COP15 Desertification conference in Abidjan.
When it was launched to much fanfare in 2007, the idea of the Great Green Wall (GGW) was to plant trees spanning across 11 countries, from Senegal to Djibouti, covering 7,800km.
The participating countries include Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan and Chad.
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At this point in time, only four million hectares out of the 100 million planned have materialised.
Despite these setbacks, GGW has moved with the times. After determining that a population boom in the region, from 83.7 million in 2019 to 196 million in 2050 could have a major impact on the original project, organisers reformulated their plan.
Instead of a literal green wall, the project aims to create tiny oases of green, promoting sustainable development for villagers, and involving them too.
Land degradation is one of the Sahel’s primary problems, along with desertification and armed conflict.
It takes a village
The revitalised plan that involves the people on the ground has improved in one northeastern town in Burkina Faso.
Speaking at a side panel at COP15, Aziz Diallo, the mayor of Dori, explains that with the decentralized governmental system, the town has had an easier time carrying out projects proposed by ngos in creating part of the GGW.
But it’s still complicated, even on a micro scale, he says. Dori has 78 villages.
“You have the municipal council for the village, and then the villager’s council for development, which can be up to 12 people; and they are the people that put the value into the projects for the village,” he says.
Diallo adds that although some are in the collective it does not mean that they have the expertise, which is why they appreciate the local NGOs that come to help them at that level.
The mayor has also had regular meetings with the Ministry of the Environment. He has asked the ministry to sign an agreement with the town, so that they are given some money to carry out their projects, and then they have a target each year of what they want to do.
“And even though it’s difficult to work on the soil, we have had some results,” he says.
"If countries fail to place #GreatGreenWall as a priority national program, they fail to raise the right scale of investment and national momentum it deserves" @tangem2009 #COP15 #Cop15Abidjan pic.twitter.com/5KY2xElCGb
— Great Green Wall Initiative (@auggwi) May 17, 2022
Many ministers
While Diallo has fostered a relationship with the ministry, in other countries that are part of the GGW, local and international organisations have struggled through red tape, including lack of coordination of the project.
Part of the challenge is finding out what ministers to deal with to create projects in certain countries and it is not always clear, says Bernard Terris, president of Danaya, a French-based NGO that works on food sovereignty.
Additionally, ”there are NGOs that work in certain territories… who do more or less the same thing, so you produce nothing in the end,” he says.
But even with lack of communication in creating the GGW plan, Terris says he still believes in it.
“It’s a great opportunity because even if everything is not well-structured, if everything is not put in place, there is the existence of the agency of the GGW with people who work in it,” he says.
Getting on with it
Other international groups have created programs not directly related to the government-backed GGW, but in the hopes that the two will eventually come together, according to Brou Saoure, the spokesman at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in N’Djamena, Chad.
Saoure says that the ICRC, together with the Red Cross of Chad has created this year a localised reforestation program in Kanem, north of the capital, N’Djamena. Locals there have to deal with desertification, and armed conflict.
“As the sand piles higher, some villages are becoming swallowed up. To stop the advancement of the sand and the desert, and protect the population, we have tried to construct a small green wall,” Saoure told RFI.
The tree-planting project protects their land, their homes, and the village itself, preventing the sand from impeding their daily lives.
The community creation is at the heart of the reformed plan of the GGW - it was once described as literally planting trees across the desert to prevent desertification, but failure due to lack of coordination, and of course climate change forced organisers to create a new structure, with more local involvement.
While some remain sceptical, people like CILSS’ Paul Ouedraogo says that organisers cannot waste any more time, especially because the expertise to create sustainable development for the Sahel’s poor already exists.
“We don’t need to start at the ground level. We already have policies that need to be implemented,” he says.
