Decoder: Turning a desert green takes more than money

An 8,000-km initiative to regreen Africa excited donors. But its success depends on the sweat and patience of farmers willing to work with nature.

By numbers alone, the Great Green Wall looks like a failure. Launched by the African Union in 2007, the initiative set out to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land across the Sahel by 2030.

Today, only 10 million hectares have been restored. Donors have been frustrated. Timelines are slipping. The African agency meant to lead the project is largely absent.

But spend time talking to the people working on the ground and a more complicated — and hopeful — picture emerges.

Stretching 8,000 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, the Great Green Wall (GGW) was conceived as a transformative corridor of restored land cutting across 11 Sahel nations — among the poorest on Earth — that sit at the southern edge of the Sahara.

The ambition was staggering. Restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million green jobs by 2030.

Turning a vision into reality

What began as a tree-planting exercise has since evolved into a comprehensive rural development initiative spanning 20 countries, promising to transform lives through a mosaic of green landscapes where food would grow.

The promise remains largely unfulfilled. But where it works, it works remarkably well and the lessons are worth paying attention to.

The GGW has been chronically underfunded ever since donor countries began shifting money from development to defence. Private finance can provide a lifeline, but money alone cannot fix a structural problem.

“Traditional aid cannot deliver systemic transformation,” says Fatou Mar, programme manager for Regreening Africa Phase II at the Centre for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry. “Donor teams arrive with ideas about how programmes should run. When funding ends, the project ends. There is no continuity.”

Mar argues that what is needed instead are enabling environments, supportive national policies, strong local institutions and genuine community leadership.

“Each country is different,” she said. “In Ethiopia, we work through Waredas, community-managed administrative entities. In Senegal, it is organized around villages and rural communities.”

To regreen Africa

In Phase II of Regreening Africa, her team changed their approach entirely.

“We let the communities lead,” she said. “We provide technical support and training.” The programme, part of the Great Green Wall, now operates across seven countries: Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia and Niger.

The most powerful Great Green Wall story has nothing to do with donors, consultants or international summits. It begins with a farmer, Yacouba Sawadogo (1946-2023) of Burkina Faso, who spent decades doing what agronomists said was impossible: turning barren, rock-hard scrubland into a thriving forest.

Working during long dry seasons, Sawadogo and another farmer dug small, deep holes — known as Zaï pits — in the degraded soil and filled them with organic waste and manure. The organic matter attracted termites, which burrowed tunnels into the soil.

When the rains arrived, those tunnels acted as natural water channels that allowed moisture to penetrate deep, rebuilding soil nutrients and coaxing seeds to sprout.

A forest grows from the sand.

Results were not immediate, but over several decades, this method transformed more than 75 acres of barren ‘moonscape’ into the Gourga Forest — a 40-hectare woodland supporting dozens of plant and tree species.

Importantly, Sawadogo shared his insights with farmers and villagers from near and far through twice-yearly market days at his farm, where seed samples and ideas were exchanged, and farmers learned from each other.

His work mirrors a technique gaining traction across the Sahel: Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). Unlike conventional tree planting — where expensive nursery saplings often die in harsh conditions — FMNR farmers identify and cultivate sprouts that grow naturally from existing tree stumps that have deep, established root systems. Survival rates can exceed 90%, and farmers’ costs are zero.

“A tree is not just a tree,” Mar said. “It is shade, fodder, soil protection. It is proof that the land is not dead.”

In the Sahel, rain does not fall gently. It arrives in violent bursts, stripping topsoil and vanishing before the hard earth can absorb it. Without intervention, degraded land cannot hold water — and without water, nothing grows.

When communities care

Zaï pits and half-moon structures slow the water down, letting it soak in and gradually rebuild the soil. These simple, labour-intensive techniques are at the heart of the Great Green Wall’s most successful pockets. And they require no imported technology, no expensive inputs and no massive donor support.

What it does require is time, commitment, training and a reason for the communities to care.

Senegal was once the star of the Great Green Wall. Under then-President Abdoulaye Wade, the country was among the initiative’s earliest and most enthusiastic champions. Progress stalled under his successor, Macky Sall.

The reasons appear to go beyond politics. A 2025 Reuters article cited a financial audit revealing severe accounting irregularities and systemic data manipulation under Sall’s administration. Auditors found that funds earmarked for environmental and capital initiatives had been rerouted, misclassified or obscured.

Yet even in Senegal, success stories exist. Micke Bourne, who leads a UN regreening initiative and the Knowledge for Great Green Wall Action platform, points to significant agroforestry transformation in the Ferlo region of Senegal driven by the international NGO Agronomes et Vétérinaires Sans Frontières along with other international partners.

“The good things happening are too often overlooked,” Bourne said.

Lessons learned

Across the Great Green Wall’s patchwork of results — strong progress in Ethiopia, Niger and Nigeria, setbacks in Chad and Sudan — a consistent pattern separates success from failure. The critical ingredients are, according to Bourne:

• Community-led stewardship, not top-down project management;

• Enabling policy environments, including land and tree tenure reform;

• Local coordination between governments, NGOs and farmers; 

• Indigenous techniques like farmer-managed natural regeneration and Zaï and half-moon pits, scaled through farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing; and

• Private sector creativity to drive value chain development.

Tree tenure laws are a persistent obstacle for FMNR. Across West Africa, national forestry acts grant farmers rights to land but not to trees.

Farmers who grow trees may legally be prohibited from pruning, harvesting or even touching them. This has hampered progress in Senegal, Burkina Faso and Mali. Reforming these laws remains an urgent, unfinished task, according to Bourne.

Where funding comes in

The International Fund for Agricultural Development, a Rome-based UN agency, has emerged as a key financial and coordination partner supporting more than 30 projects across the GGW’s primary countries, Bourne said.

Its approach focuses on integrated ecosystem management and climate resilience for smallholder farmers — a deliberate shift away from paying villagers to plant rows of seedlings in the desert sand.

The Great Green Wall is not the success story its founders envisioned. It is behind schedule, underfunded and unevenly implemented. Where governance has failed, through corruption, political indifference or institutional absence, so has the land. But it is not dead.

In the places where farmers have committed to the slow, labour-intensive work of digging pits, protecting tree sprouts and sharing knowledge with neighbours, formerly farmable land is coming back to life.

The restored landscapes are feeding families, diversifying incomes and proving that the Sahel’s land is not barren. It never was.

The Great Green Wall’s most important lesson may be this: Transformation does not begin with a summit or donor pledges. It begins with a farmer, a pit and the patience to wait for rain.

Questions to consider:

1. What is the Great Green Wall initiative?

2. What was the most important less learned by those trying to “regreen” the Sahel region of Africa?

3. Can you think of something satisfying you accomplished through hard work and patience?