New $78m initiative to restore land, improve livelihoods across Great Green Wall countries – EnviroNews

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A new $78 million programme aims to restore 270,000 hectares of degraded land and improve the livelihoods of five million people across nine countries of the Great Green Wall. With funding support from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and implementation support from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the initiative will support the regeneration of one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions.

The initiative brings together nine national governments stretching from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa – Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal – with UNEP, the West African Development Bank (BOAD), and the Pan-African Agency of the Great Green Wall. UNEP will implement eight of the programme’s ten projects and coordinate regional delivery, while BOAD will implement two projects.

The Sahel, the semi-arid belt stretching across Africa south of the Sahara, is warming around 1.5 times faster than the global average. About two-thirds of productive land is degraded, placing pressure on food systems, water resources, and livelihoods. A combination of environmental stress, food insecurity, and conflict has contributed to the displacement of over 4 million people within the region.

The programme, named Transformation Approach to Large Scale Investment in Support of the Implementation of the Great Green Wall Initiative, responds to these interconnected challenges and invests in landscape restoration, strengthening the ecosystems that sustain agriculture, pastoralism, and rural livelihoods.  

“UNEP has a proud history of working with Great Green Wall countries, helping them to identify where to restore degraded land and improve livelihoods. This programme provides the finance to act on that work across nine countries, and a common framework so that they can plan, measure, and learn from the results together. It is a direct contribution to the countries’ commitment to bring 30 per cent of degraded land under restoration by 2030,” said Susan Gardner, Director of UNEP’s Ecosystems Division.

The programme builds on  more than a decade of restoration work led by the Great Green Wall countries, and on UNEP’s earlier GEF-funded work with them to assess degraded land and identify where restoration can succeed. It introduces a coordinated regional approach geared towards alignment, improved monitoring, and enhanced knowledge exchange across participating countries. 

The $78 million GEF grant is complemented by co-financing from the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and bilateral partners, bringing total programme resources to over US$500 million.

“The strength of the Great Green Wall lies in the leadership of its countries. By connecting national priorities through a shared regional framework, this programme will help countries accelerate restoration, exchange knowledge, and scale up solutions that respond to their own landscapes and communities” said Almoustapha Garba, Executive Secretary of the Pan-African Agency of the Great Green Wall.

The largest individual restoration efforts under the new programme are in Mali, where 150,000 hectares will be regenerated across the Kayes, Nioro, and Ségou regions, and Niger, where 55,000 hectares of farmland, woodland and grazing land will be rehabilitated. In the Gambia, wetland and forest corridor restoration will benefit nearly 800,000 people, the majority of whom are women.

Women-led enterprises are central to projects in Nigeria’s Kebbi State and Mauritania, while Chad and Burkina Faso focus on drought-resilient land management serving communities on the frontline of desertification. In Ethiopia, 22,000 hectares of degraded land will be restored and 40,000 hectares of natural forest brought under improved management.