The Sahara doesn’t advance like a noisy army – it creeps. Year by year, decade by decade, the desert edges southwards across the Sahel, drying out the soil, choking grasses, and turning farmland into wasteland. It’s a catastrophe that many Africans have come to see as unstoppable.
But a surprising project is unfolding across the breadth of the Sahel, one so vast it seems rather like science fiction: an 8,000km living wall is being planted from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea, proving that, with enough effort, the Sahara can indeed be held back.
The project is Africa’s Great Green Wall which, when finished, will be the largest living structure on the planet. It’s not a wall of brick or stone but a patchwork of food forests, farmlands, and grasslands that has already created three million jobs, is feeding half a million people, and is bringing hope to many who were previously destitute.
“We didn’t believe we’d ever have a good harvest like this. But now it’s OK, thank God.”
Take Rabia, a Sudanese refugee now living in Chad. “We didn’t believe we’d ever have a good harvest like this,” she said in a recent video by the YouTuber Andrew Millison. “But now it’s OK, thank God. The work is going well, and I wish everybody involved the best.”
She is one of a million Sudanese refugees in Chad, many of whom have been integrated into the farming projects of the Wall alongside local Chadians.
Catching the rain
What makes this story fascinating is how it’s being done: not with huge earthworks or advanced technologies, but with ancient techniques that have been refined over centuries, to transform wastelands into gardens.
In the Sahel, rain falls intensely for just a few months each year. The rest of the time, the land bakes under the harsh sun, becoming so hard-packed that when the rains finally arrive, the water simply rushes away, without soaking into the soil.
The farmers of the Great Green Wall have a simple solution: they dig. Half-moon-shaped basins are carved into the earth, each one facing the contours above it like an open hand. Within each half-moon, a series of steps descends in increasing depth, creating a series of small catchments. When rain falls, it collects in these structures and seeps slowly into the ground rather than running off it. Over time, this gradual accumulation increases the groundwater available to plants and eventually even raises the water table itself.
Moisture becomes available to plants for months beyond the rains, and eventually, in the most mature sites, all year round.
The trees’ roots lock the earth in place, while their branches create shade for smaller plants to flourish.
Around these half-moons, the farmers dig small round pits called Zai pits. These collect the organic matter that wind and dust blow into them, gradually enriching the soil until what was once barren earth becomes fertile ground.
Local tree species are planted within the half-moons, along with seeds of grasses and other plants. The trees’ roots lock the earth in place, while their branches create shade for smaller plants to flourish. Birds arrive. Wind carries more seeds. Gradually, the half-moons become concentrations of fertility that grow richer with each passing year.
The results are impressive. In one mature site in Niger, an 800-hectare area had recovered so fully that it holds water year-round, Millison found in a rare tour of the region with the United Nations World Food Programme.
Within that single site, three million cubic metres of water have soaked into the ground instead of running off it. Fifteen percent of that water penetrates deep enough to regenerate the permanent aquifer − a gift to future generations. The tree canopy breaks the Sahara’s drying winds, livestock graze on the greenery, and villagers harvest vegetables, fruits, and medicinal plants.
Temperatures in these planted areas are five to eight degrees cooler than in the nearby desert.
Transformation from desert to oasis
In one five-mile block alone, villagers planted about 100,000 trees and laid down 20 tonnes of grass seed. The transformation from desert to oasis took hard work and patience, but it was certainly successful.
Access to the project sites in Niger is severely restricted by the military, which patrols the region to protect communities from insurgents who cross the porous borders. Millison’s visit was rare and closely supervised, yet he was deeply impressed. “What I’m witnessing here,” he observed, “is the repair of soils and water across Africa at a scale I never dreamt possible.”
The human impact has been dramatic. Over the past five years in Niger, an average of three million people per year faced food insecurity and depended on aid to survive. In that same period, the resilience projects enabled half a million people to grow their own food and develop self-sufficiency.
“When the land is restored, it provides grasses to feed livestock, which means people have milk to drink and meat to eat,” observed Millison.
Ugandan-born agronomist Andrew Hadlow, who is now based in the UK and consults in several countries, told the Dolphin Bay Brief that there are huge potential benefits for an anti-desertification project such as the Wall. “A project of this nature could help mitigate climate change, slow the expansion of the Sahara desert and offer sustainability for rural communities.
“It is projects like the Great Green Wall that are good for Africa, should they succeed.”
Brainchild of the African Union
The Great Green Wall is the brainchild of the African Union, launched in 2007 with the commitment of all 11 countries it crosses: from Senegal on the west coast, through Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, to Djibouti in the east. It’s a continental ambition of remarkable scope, funded by the World Bank, the European Union, the African Development Bank, the UN World Food Programme, and others.
And yet, the Wall is struggling.
“It is projects like the Great Green Wall that are good for Africa, should they succeed.”
The project was launched with bold targets: by 2030, it would restore 100 million hectares of land, create 10 million jobs, and sequester 250 million tons of CO2 emissions. As of 2024, the project was only 30 percent complete. “It is an understatement to stress that we are not in line with our common objective,” admitted UN desertification chief Alain Richard Donwahi in a Reuters report.
About 30 million hectares of land − roughly equivalent to the size of the Philippines − has been planted so far. While impressive, it leaves 70 million hectares still to be restored. Some regions, notably Senegal, have seen very little greening despite considerable planting efforts, a recent academic study found.
The obstacles are familiar to large-scale development projects: funding shortfalls, difficulties channelling money down to the ground level, and the sheer logistical challenge of monitoring and coordinating hundreds of different organisations working across multiple countries with very different political situations and security concerns.
The project requires not just vision, but long-term coordination and patience.
Building momentum
In recent months, momentum has started to build up. An accelerator programme is now working to address the delays through improved monitoring, evaluation and reporting. It is led by the Pan-African Agency for the Great Green Wall, a new institution dedicated to the project. Carbon markets are being explored as one way to plug the funding gap.
More than 300 projects are being tracked in a dedicated observatory. “The Great Green Wall is going to have wonderful numbers,” said Gilles Amadou Ouédraogo, a programme management officer at the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, “because there’s so much going on out there right now.”
The Wall is still very much a work in progress and is racing against time to meet its 2030 targets.
But in places like that 800-hectare site in Niger, and in the hands of hundreds of thousands of farmers like Rabia in Chad, a transformation is taking place. They are showing that the Sahara’s advance is not inevitable, after all.
They are proving it, one half-moon at a time.
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