The line that unites Africa

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The Great Green Wall is humanity’s most audacious initiative in response to the global climate emergency. Best visualised as a ‘wall of trees’ spanning from Senegal to Djibouti, the Great Green Wall is a burgeoning green corridor bringing life back to degraded landscapes, growing climate resilience, food security and jobs for the millions who live along its path.

By 2030 the ambition is to restore 100 million hectares of currently degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million rural livelihoods.

Great Green Wall Frontline is a new campaign to bring fresh energy to that mission. It aims to excite a new generation of community ownership in making the Great Green Wall happen.

Unleashing the imagination and enterprising initiative of frontline citizens at the heart of the movement.

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Desert

The Great Green Wall

The Great Green Wall is taking root in Africa’s Sahel region, at the southern edge of the Sahara desert and on the very frontline of climate change. Today, 80% of land is degraded in a region where temperatures are rising 1.5 times faster than global averages and are expected to soar by as much as 5 degrees by the end of the century. Moreover, climate change and desertification act as threat multipliers, contributing to a host of unfolding crises in the region, including:

  1. Food insecurity: 33 million people are currently classified as food insecure in the Sahel.
  2. Unemployment: Land degradation is depriving people of livelihoods in a region where 80% of people are employed by the agriculture sector.
  3. Migration: As many as 85 million people are expected to embark on a mass exodus from the Continent by 2050.
  4. Conflict: Age-old tensions between farming and herding communities are intensifying because of climate change as the availability of usable land diminishes and water sources become less reliable.

Launched in 2007, the Great Green Wall was originally envisaged as an afforestation program that has become an increasingly more holistic and systemic mission to address highly interrelated environmental, social, and development issues.

An original core of 11 countries comprise the burgeoning Wall: Burkina Faso; Chad; Djibouti; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Mali; Mauritania; Niger; Nigeria; Senegal; and Sudan.

In recent years, the Wall has also inspired other African ‘branches’, with the aim of regreening the continent - one growing along the northern rim of the continent, and the other growing south, deep into the drylands beyond the savannahs.

Learn more about the Great Green Wall at www.greatgreenwall.org

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Why a Frontline
Movement

The Great Green Wall has increasingly captivated world leaders as a compelling solution to the climate crisis. But unless the vision is owned and powered by the millions of people living across the Sahel and drylands of Africa, this extraordinary ambition will never be realised.

Great Green Wall Frontline is a new campaign that aims to put power, money and tools into the hands of frontline communities bringing its urgent vision to life.

Our frontline campaign does not replace the Great Green Wall or any of its existing expressions. Rather, it aims to inspire a new generation of frontline leaders to grow a wall uniting communities across Africa.

Great Green Wall Frontline is in the process of launching 5 core platforms, which will roll out over the coming months and years:

  1. Power: A series of citizen assemblies as a Continent- wide mission to galvanize citizen agency, with a pilot in The Gambia
  2. Money: A Community fund enabling African civil society organisations to access previously inaccessible capital to fund land restoration, tree growing and sustainable community enterprises.
  3. Models: Sharing the grassroot models and tools that work - speeding up the adoption of best practice.
  4. Stories: Celebrating the people and places at the forefront of delivering the Great Green Wall one community at a time.
  5. Movement: Calls to action from micro-investments and purchasing power to political pressure

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