In West Africa, a massive reforestation project “consumed by terror”
Launched in 2007, the Great Green Wall project in the Sahel region was intended to create a vast wall of vegetation in the desert by mobilizing tree planters and farmers. But the project has been undermined by the spread of violent extremism in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Nigeria, according to an investigation by a West African investigative unit.
The idea of a "vegetation wall" of around 8,000 kilometers, from Senegal to Djibouti, to prevent the advance of the desert, was approved by the African Union in 2007, recalls the Norbert Zongo Cell for Investigative Journalism in West Africa (Cenozo) , which conducted the investigation with the support of the Pulitzer Center.
This “Great Green Wall” was to be completed in 2030 and would eventually become “three times larger than the Great Barrier Reef in Australia” , and even “the largest living structure on the planet”, the site assures. Designed to mitigate the “devastating effects” of global warming through massive reforestation in the vast Sahelian strip, it ultimately never saw the light of day.
Cenozo's investigation chronicles the "rise and fall" of the Great Green Wall through the blows dealt to this ambitious project "consumed by terror." In addition to human and demographic pressures, mismanagement, and insufficient funding, it was primarily the spread of violent extremism that wiped out the advances of this green wall in certain areas of Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
Cenozo gives pride of place to the trajectories of those who believed in it and who invested in the project at the local level. Like Nigerian Aliyu Garba. When he was asked in 2020 to “ participate in [the] planting of trees” in Rumfar Akke, a village in northwest Nigeria, the man saw it as “recognition of his many efforts in agriculture.” But he “almost died while watering [the plants] two years later.” An incursion by armed men resulted in the looting of the village and his kidnapping, in a “hostage for ransom” approach. These events were attributed to “rural banditry that has been going on for ten years.”
The project is also being hampered in many other northern Nigerian states by violence from Islamist insurgents Boko Haram and the armed group Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP).
In northern Burkina Faso, where “thorny shrubs bend under a relentless Sahelian wind,” five regions were affected by massive reforestation.
There, it was extremist groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb that undermined it. Burkinabe communes that were “once vibrant” under this project “have become war fronts […]. In most places, villagers have been forced to leave everything behind […] and vegetation restoration workers have been forced into hiding. […] In Dori and Aribinda, where nearly 600,000 seedlings were planted between 2013 and 2015, planting has slowed to a trickle.”
Five years before the project's planned end, "less than half of the objective has been reached," and hopes of seeing it succeed are slim, assures Cenozo.
