- A recent study has examined the progress to realize Africa’s Great Green Wall initiative in Senegal, which is often hailed as the model for this continent-wide project.
- The study finds Senegal has achieved encouraging social and economic results — but far less success on the ecological front.
- The study’s authors, echoing complaints from African officials, say that far less money has actually reached implementing countries and organizations than has been announced at global forums.
Earlier in 2025, political and administrative leaders in Senegal gathered to plant trees in a forest in the country’s northwest to mark National Tree Day. They took advantage of the ceremony to call for action towards a greener, more resilient and sustainable country. Senegal is one of 11 countries participating in Africa’s Great Green Wall (GGW) initiative which aims to achieve these goals. However, a newly published study finds the GGW has not delivered ecological benefits on the scale promised by pledges of more than $20 billion in support.
According to the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the initiative seeks to secure food and water, provide habitat for wildlife, and help stem the outward migration of people from drought-stricken parts of the Sahel: Senegal and 10 other African countries along the Sahel region are partnering in an ambitious effort to restore 100 million hectares (247 million acres) of land, sequester 250 million metric tons of carbon, and create 10 million jobs. The Great Green Wall’s project activities extend from Mauritania and Senegal in the west, across Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and Chad, into Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti in the east.
The study, published in the journal Land Use Policy, highlights the difficulty of translating the promises of the GGW into tangible socio-ecological change.
The Senegalese components of the GGW have frequently been cited as a model of progress since the project’s launch in 2007. But, like its dryland and desert counterparts in the project, Senegal has faced serious challenges in carrying out the project, in many cases linked to difficulties mobilizing funding.
Focusing on Senegal, the study’s authors found that rural communities have gained economic and social benefits from the GGW, particularly through seasonal jobs and the provision of social services. But satellite imagery and field surveys reveal limited ecological impact. Of the 36 reforestation plots examined in northern Senegal, only two showed notable signs of greening — and just one of those displayed results beyond what could reasonably be expected in light of other factors such as favorable rainfall.
The authors suggest this lack of greening stems from the fact that “both tree planting activities on the ground and financial pledges at the global level remain in the realm of the ‘spectacular’ — that is, they are intended more for their symbolic than practical value.”
Annah Lake Zhu, lead author of the study and a professor of environmental policy at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, told Mongabay in an email that the Great Green Wall itself is largely symbolic: “[A] dream in the minds of donors, politicians and the public. That’s not bad in itself. But if it remains a dream, it risks becoming a mirage—something that never materializes.”
She said that “promises and financial programs often function as a kind of performance — symbolic gestures in favor of the environment rather than drivers of real socio-ecological change. Power lies more in symbolism than in tangible results.”
Misunderstandings around funding
At the One Planet Summit in Paris in 2021, international donors pledged $19 billion to support the pan-African GGW initiative — on top of $4 billion announced six years earlier at the COP21 climate summit. Yet, the beneficiary countries almost unanimously point to a lack of funding as one of the main obstacles to the project’s implementation.
Speaking to Mongabay on the sidelines of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) meeting in Riyadh in late 2024, Abakar Mahamat Zougoulou, the scientific and technical director of the Pan-African Agency of the GGW, said these pledges amount to little more than empty political promises.
“So, where is this $19 billion?” he said. “I am willing to challenge anyone — I’d like to be face-to-face with them so we can talk about it. In the two years from 2021 to the end of 2022, I realized there was no money. There’s too much politics going on behind all these announcements.”
The study also found that between 2011 and 2019, donors pledged $870 million — only a fraction of the billions announced — but beneficiary companies received just $149 million. In other words, more than 80% of the funds supposedly disbursed are not officially accounted for in national project records, leaving a gap of more than $700 million.
A multi-stakeholder platform, called the Great Green Wall Accelerator, has been established to improve coordination and collaboration between donors and other stakeholders involved in the initiative. The platform is overseen by the Global Mechanism, the financing arm of UNCCD.
Also, at COP16, Gilles Amadou Ouédraogo, a program management officer for the mechanism, told Mongabay that efforts to mobilize funding like the $19 billion pledged at the One Planet Summit are still on track. But he lamented about the persistent misunderstandings about how this funding is intended to be allocated, particularly for projects dedicated exclusively to the GGW.
“Countries are complaining. It’s difficult for them to accept that some Great Green Wall projects are adopted at the national level, yet the national Great Green Wall agencies are not involved in their design, implementation, evaluation, or methodology,” Ouédraogo said.
“We really need to ensure that when funds earmarked for Great Green Wall projects reach the countries, they are directed to the environment ministries or national Great Green Wall agencies,” he said. “Too often, these agencies are disconnected from the process and excluded from technical implementation — and that’s a serious problem.”
The Great Green Wall, like many climate projects in Africa, relies heavily on external funding rather than on domestic resources — a dependency that can undermine its success.
Speaking at the Twentieth Session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) in Kenya in July, former UNCCD executive secretary Ibrahim Thiaw argued that https://www.unccd.int/news-stories/statements/amcen40-remarks-ibrahim-thiaw Africa must take its destiny into its own hands when it comes to green finance, shifting the narrative from that of a perpetual victim to a continent actively solving its climate challenges.
Thiaw’s perspective was echoed by Amadou Ndiaye, a lecturer of environmental sciences at Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow University in Diamniadio, Senegal, and co-author of the GGW study. “I think conceiving the project through an overwhelming reliance on financing, especially external financing, is an original sin—it puts us in a position of waiting,” he wrote to Mongabay in an email.
“I’m not saying external financing isn’t important. It is. But it needs to be carefully planned. Beyond that, two points seem important to me: first, a project of this type does not succeed in a single generation,” he said. “And secondly, it is crucial to take local peoples’ way of life into account.”
Banner image: Tree seedlings at a nursery set up in the village of Koyli Alpha to support the Great Green Wall initiative in Senegal. Image © Benedicte Kurzen/NOOR for FAO.
This story was first published here in French on Aug. 15, 2025.
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Citation:
Zhu, L. A., Ndiaye, A., Dahm, R., Mauclaire, M. & Boas, I. (2025). Africa’s Great Green Mirage? Assessing the disconnect between global finance and local implementation in Africa’s Great Green Wall, Land Use Policy, 157. 107670. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2025.107670
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