Green Belt Offers Shade for Locals

A green belt has been built around Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, as a protective barrier against the encroaching desert and to provide shade and productive land to its growing population.

“One of the objectives of the green belt is to lower the city’s temperature; that’s why we’re also planting trees,” explains Moumini Sawadogo of the Burkinabé Red Cross. The organization financed a two-hectare garden as part of the belt, the construction of two water wells, and training in agroecology.

The 2,000-hectare belt project started in the 1970s with the initial goal to reforest 2,100 hectares at an annual rate of 100 hectares. By 1986, trees were planted across 1,032 hectares, eventually reaching 2,000 hectares. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, one third of the territory – some 9 million hectares of productive land – is degraded, with an estimated average degradation rate of 360,000 hectares yearly. Beyond holding back the desert, the green belt is meant to combat heat and promote urban agriculture to help feed the city whose population doubled in just 14 years, as per National Institute of Statistics and Demography data. City residents can have a plot of six beds, each about 3 meters long and 1 meter wide, offering a solution to people fleeing rural areas, who are accustomed to working the land.