UN Backs Great Green Wall

The United Nations and partners have launched a $78 million programme to restore degraded land and improve livelihoods for five million people across Africa’s Great Green Wall. The programme will revitalise the initiative, bringing total pooled resources to more than $500 million when combined with co-financing from partners.

The Global Environment Facility is providing the funding, while the UN Environment Programme will implement eight of the programme’s 10 projects and coordinate delivery across nine countries. The programme will restore more than 270,000 hectares of degraded land across nine Sahel countries.

The initiative brings together nine national governments with the UN Environment Programme, the West African Development Bank, and the Pan-African Agency of the Great Green Wall. The nine African countries involved are Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal.

More than half of the people expected to benefit from the programme are women. The initiative is designed to combat land degradation while expanding economic opportunities for communities facing growing climate and livelihood pressures.

The Great Green Wall is one of Africa’s flagship environmental initiatives, seeking to restore degraded landscapes across the Sahel while improving food security and resilience. The new investment comes as desertification, drought, and climate change increasingly threaten agricultural livelihoods across the region.

The programme’s funding is a major lifeline for the ambitious project, addressing severe land degradation, drought, and climate vulnerability across nine Sahelian countries. The UN Environment Programme will implement eight of the programme’s 10 projects, while the West African Development Bank will implement the remaining two.

The Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification has demonstrated how land restoration is becoming a new investment sector. The conference showed that land itself is changing from a natural resource to a factor of economic resilience and an object of investment analysis.

The issues addressed by the conference are closely interconnected, with climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation being consequences of the same unsustainable models of production and consumption. Up to 40 per cent of the world’s land has already been degraded, leading to lower crop yields, reduced livestock feed resources, and higher water costs.