Sixteen years ago, the African Union, a joint organization of dozens of African states, started a real major project.
The Great Green Wall of the Sahara and Sahel initiative had a big goal. A green vegetation zone had to be created on the edge of the Sahara in the Sahel region by 2030. It could be done by planting trees.
Species typical for the region would be planted in a zone 7,775 kilometers long and fifteen kilometers wide. This describes, among other things British broadcasting company BBC.
The green belt would stretch across Africa from west to east, from the Atlantic coast all the way to the Red Sea.
It would be built by the Sahel countries along the way: Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti.
The Great Green Wall would act as a shield against the Sahara for these countries.
Forestation and restoration would prevent desertification. It would revitalize a hundred million hectares of desertified land into arable and pasture land and create ten million new jobs.
The green wall would act as a carbon sink, capturing 250 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the time it is completed.
This would improve the living conditions, food security and self-sufficiency of the residents of the area, he estimates Foodbank-organization.
Ambitious the project against desertification was even called the eighth wonder of the world.
It is the largest integrated program in terms of area that humanity has ever undertaken. The UN has named it one of its ten key ecological restoration projects. Since joining has been announced by Somalia.
The green wall of the Sahel has a great value as an example and a symbolic meaning for developing countries. It was not dictated by the industrialized countries, but the African states devised and created it themselves.
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“Desertification is caused by the impoverishment of the soil due to overgrazing and over-cultivation.”
For green there were good grounds for the wall.
The name Sahel comes from the Arabic word for coast sahil. This coast of the Sahara, the world’s largest sand sea, is a barren, scrubby and grassy savanna embroidered with sand dunes and acacia trees.
It has an area of about three million square kilometers, roughly ten times the size of Finland.
The UN estimates that around 75 million people live in the Sahel region. The population is mainly small farmers and nomadic herders who persevere in living conditions that are among the poorest and harshest in the world.
The UN Convention on Desertification (UNCCD) was created in 1959 with the Sahel region in mind.
The following year, the Sahel green zone was proposed by the president of Senegal, who was one of the most prominent heads of state in the period of African independence Léopold Sedar Senghor. At that time, the time was not yet ripe for the idea.
Since then, an estimated 80 percent of the Sahel’s soil has been significantly impoverished. Overgrazing, inefficient farming methods and climate change have accelerated desertification and loss of nature.
A soldier helps locals plant acacia trees in Senegal.
When the construction of the green wall began, all eleven states were strongly committed to it.
The World Bank and industrialized countries had promised tens of billions of euros in support, and hundreds of non-governmental organizations were eager to participate.
Despite the good starting points, the green wall of the Sahel is still very much half way, science magazine Nature reviews in its editorial in April.
Published by the Convention on Desertification and the African Union in 2020 operational assessment stated that the program had only been able to rehabilitate four million hectares of desertified land. That’s only four percent of the target.
350,000 jobs had been created, a British newspaper estimated The Guardian. African Union Project Coordinator Paul Tangem confirms the figures as correct for the news agency IPS.
In order to reach its goal in time, the program should revitalize more than ten million hectares per year. It would cost almost 50 billion euros, Tangem calculates.
So far, the green wall project has spent just under 2.5 billion euros of the approximately 30 billion euros originally promised to it.
When several other African countries became interested in the green wall and the international funding it received, the African Union expanded the program and its goals in 2012.
The Sahel models of the pan-African program (Pan African Agency of the Green Wall) are being implemented in other parts of Africa.
The purpose is no longer just to plant a tree belt, but to develop new ways of land use in barren and dry areas and to create new, productive green areas that are better suited to local conditions.
The development of irrigation, water use, soil, vegetable gardens and plants that tolerate the conditions best, and the protection of native nature came along.
Solution is right in itself, believes the director who follows the program at the World Environment Fund in GEF Jean-Marc Sinnassamy.
“We are not fighting against the progress of the Sahara. The Sahara is a very stable ecosystem, and the desert in most of these eleven countries is not advancing at all. Desertification is caused by the impoverishment of the soil due to overgrazing and over-farming,” he reminds the magazine National Geographicin in the interview.
But as the operation expanded, the original goal became blurred and the overlap increased. The program is now more complicated and more difficult to monitor and administer, Transparency International estimates. The organization monitors corruption and the implementation of good governance.
These problems prevent the program from achieving its goals and leave it very vulnerable to corruption, Transparency states.
The green wall is currently being built by the African Union, the UN Convention on Desertification UNCDD, donor and implementing countries, and the program organizations GGWI and PAGGW.
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“A large part of the funds slips into one’s own pockets rather than into development.”
Several actors create overlap and the monitoring and evaluation systems are fragmented and confused, Transparency states. Many organizations tell the public about their activities, their use of funds and their decisions in a vague and scarce way. Even the annual reports are missing.
Insufficient reporting has led to serious credibility problems and a decrease in external funding, Transparency criticizes.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization FAO analyzed the GGWI’s use of funds by eleven states in its report in 2021. According to it, they announced that they spent a total of 200 million euros on the program. The amount is less than a tenth of the 2.5 billion euros directed to the program.
Most of the countries in the Sahel are led by an absolute dictator or a military government.
“In them, a large part of the funds slip into one’s own pockets rather than into development,” says the environmental expert Hans-Josef Fell For the foreign service of the German broadcasting company German Wellelle.
Corona pandemic and Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine have significantly increased food and fuel prices across Africa. They have also cooled the faith of both implementers and financiers in the green wall.
In the worst case, the program may shrink into separate projects in a few countries that are not connected to each other. Donors are selective, Nature reminds us.
Of the eleven countries building the green wall, only three, namely Senegal, Djibouti and Eritrea, do not currently have a civil war, clashes between armed rebel movements or attacks by extremist Islamic terrorist organizations. That’s what it says US public service television network PBS.
Attacks, looting and violence by Al-Qaeda and ISIS local militias have driven 4.5 million people from their homes in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, International Committee of the Red Cross states.
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If the green wall rises to its desired dimensions, it would reduce not only poverty but also the flow of unemployed and hopeless young men into terrorist organizations.
Jo the work done has still shown that creating a green zone is possible and useful if the framework is in order.
The program is implemented by more than 20 African countries on different sides of the continent. Around 18 million hectares of land have been reclaimed in this wider area of the green wall. The models are also applied in Fiji and Haiti.
Climate change and Africa’s strong dependence on agriculture and animal husbandry make the program even more important than when it was founded, science magazine Nature states.
About 500 million people in sub-Saharan Africa live in areas threatened or undergoing desertification.
It is estimated that the Sahel region has warmed by a degree since 1970, twice the world average. The temperature continues to rise, droughts are more frequent and more severeAfrican Business states.
The poorer and more desperate the communities living in the Sahel become, the easier it is for them to recruit young men into the armed forces, specifies Stockholm peace research institute Sipri.
If the green wall of the Sahel rises to its desired dimensions, it would reduce not only poverty but also the flow of unemployed and hopeless young men to terrorist organizations or across the Sahara to Europe.