I’ve written before about the Great Green Wall across the Sahel, aiming to shore up the region and hold back the Sahara desert. Whether or not it is ever completed, it is already one of the most ambitious environmental projects ever attempted. It’s a remarkable feat of international cooperation, and a vast mobilisation of volunteer labour over the course of decades.
The name ‘Great Green Wall’ is evocative and suggests a big line of trees or a band of forest. It’s not quite like that, certainly not at this stage, and so it’s helpful to see what it looks like on the ground. This video below does a good job of that. It’s by Andrew Millison, a permaculture teacher and communicator who runs a rather good Youtube channel on land restoration, gardening and placemaking.
Put aside the title – it’s not really the UN holding back the Sahara desert, but many thousands of local people working with UN support. And let’s not complain that the before and after photos below are almost certainly the dry season on the left and the rainy season two years later on the right. It’s still impressive, and if you give this a couple of minutes to get going I think you’ll find it inspiring.
A couple of things to draw your attention to. One is those half-moon water catchment structures. I like the way these look like teethmarks in the desert, as if it’s being pushed back one bite at a time. These are an indigenous technique developed in the region. The UN and its partners have taken a traditional practice and are passing it on to communities that didn’t know it or had forgotten it.
In doing so, they are building on the work of pioneers such as Yacouba Sawadogo, who demonstrated these catchment structures in Burkina Faso. He fined tuned this land restoration approach over thirty years of patient work from the 1970s onwards, and taught it to farmers in over a hundred villages in the area.
As the video mentions, this learning is happening through participative community planning, rather than international agencies coming in and dictating what must be done. That’s very important, after the many failed projects of the 90s that didn’t get buy-in from the people they were supposed to be reaching.
With the benefit of their global reach, it’s also interesting to see agencies like the UN bringing in indigenous techniques from other parts of the world, such as the forest gardens developed in Brazil that are now being planted across West Africa. So what we’re seeing in the Great Green Wall at the moment is a really nice example of old and new learning, traditional wisdom and modern science.
It remains to be seen if all of this can be scaled up and sustained. No doubt there will be false starts and wasted efforts too, in a project of this size. But the idea remains a solid one. To reclaim a slogan usually deployed less positively, let’s build that wall!
The Earthbound Report 
Really informative – thanks!