The Great Green Wall Is Moving Forward!

The Great Green Wall (GGW) is one step closer to becoming a reality now that all efforts to halt and reverse desertification in the Sahel by 2030 are properly tracked, evaluated, and funded.

“We want each and every single country to be able to track the progress and the benefits of the Great Green Wall,” says Gilles Amadou Ouédraogo, program management officer at the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.  “My fantasy is one day being able to associate a dollar number to every hectare that is restored in the Great Green Wall.”

The 8,000-kilometer-long GGW – stretching from Dakar in the west to Djibouti in the east – aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, create 10 million jobs, and sequester 250 million metric tons of carbon by 2030. So far, 18 million hectares have been restored, and 350,000 jobs have been created. In 2021, an accelerator program was announced, generating an additional $19 billion from donors to plug the funding shortfalls and address some pressing challenges that slowed the initiative. In 2024, the repository for the data in the form of a dashboard called the Great Green Wall Observatory was launched, and the online platform allows the tracking of funding for the GGW from different donors, as well as the results and progress of 350 projects. Through the harmonized monitoring framework, all 11 countries’ contributions are measured. It is then possible to identify which projects work, which don’t, and where resources could be diverted.