World Bank/GEF Sahel and West Africa Program Supports the Great Green Wall Initiative

benin/burkina faSo/Chad/ ethioPia/ghana/MaLi/ Mauritania/niger/nigeria/ SenegaL/Sudan/togo

Ayeleh Fikre, a 73-year-old farmer from Ethiopia’s Amhara region, devoted her life to perfecting reforestation techniques. Yacouba Sawadogo, the 70-year-old farmer from Burkina Faso, known as The Man Who Stopped the Desert, spent over 30 years reversing desertification. Thanks to these farmers, and to many other unknown innovators, unproductive lands have become a source a life again. However, the challenge facing African countries is to work together to harness these modest successes and expand their opportunities.

Success means scaling up these actions through investment, knowledge, and partnership. The World Bank is doing just that through the Sahel and West Africa Program (SAWAP), which is its main contribution to the continent’s Great Green Wall Initiative. Funded in collaboration with the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the SAWAP supports the efforts of farmers by scaling up investments on sustainable land and water management, facilitating knowledge sharing, and using the World Bank’s convening power to bring partners together.

The multisectoral program uses a landscape approach working with agriculture, environment, water, and energy to expand sustainable land and water management. It strengthens a country-driven vision in 12 Sahelian and West African countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan, and Togo. This program includes an innovative framework to address the region’s environmental and social issues—Africa is leading the way on tackling sustainable land and water management in a changing climate. Based on the smart management of a landscape as a portfolio of renewable assets, the program hopes to secure more food, fiber, freshwater, and firewood while protecting natural assets in the face of climate variability and change.

The program builds on the many years of experience developed under the TerrAfrica Partnership Program on Sustainable Land and Water Management led by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). It leverages TerrAfrica partnerships and benefits from the knowledge of its partners, their investments, and the harmonization of efforts promoted by the coalition.

The SAWAP is composed of 12 discrete country projects that have various entry points, such as land management, biodiversity, water resources, sustainable forest management, disaster risk management, agribusiness, and food security. The portfolio is glued together by a regional project, the Building Resilience through Innovation, Communication, and Knowledge Services (BRICKS) Project. The BRICKS Project provides technical assistance to the regional centers of excellence of Interstate Committee for Drought

Control in the Sahel (CILSS), the Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS), and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to facilitate technical knowledge exchanges and monitor services among the 12 country investment operations in the broader portfolio. The resulting global environmental benefits could include sustainable management of natural resources (land, water, and vegetation) on up to 2 million hectares of croplands, rangelands, and dryland forest ecosystems per country; protection of threatened drylands’ biodiversity; protection against erosion and desertification; and the potential for sequestering 0.5 to 3.1 million tons of carbon per year.

The most important achievement is the Great Green Wall Initiative’s potential to transform the lives of millions of people from Dakar to Addis Ababa and lift them out of poverty.

Web site: www.terrafrica.org