The Great Green Wall Initiative

The objective of the Great Green Wall Initiative (GGWI) is to provide people living in drylands, including nomadic communities, with additional livelihoods while enhancing their food security. The original concept of the GGWI was to establish a physical barrier of trees from Dakar to Djibouti, focusing on a strip of land 15 km wide and 7,100 m long that includes Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan. The purpose of this barrier is to slow the advancement of the desert and impede the hot winds that increase erosion, thereby improving the ecosystems of the Sahel. The concept has since evolved into a mosaic of interventions that consider sustainable livelihoods and the interests of the local populations. Each country addresses problems within its own local context, including inter alia: i) land degradation; ii) climate change adaptation and mitigation; iii) biodiversity; and iv) forestry. The GGWI is therefore a resilience programme with integrated actions that address challenges in sectors such as: i) natural resource management; ii) infrastructure; and iii) sustainability of rural production systems, including agriculture, breeding and forestry.