Great Green wall Accelerator

Great Green wall Accelerator

Context: barely 18 percent of the Great Green Wall’s objectives for 2030 have been achieved

Content:

• The Great Green Wall multi-actor Accelerator, announced by the President of France Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders at the One Planet Summit on January 11th, 2021, seeks to facilitate the coordination and collaboration of donors and stakeholders involved in the Great Green Wall Initiative.  From an initial 14.3 billion US dollars pledged in January 2021, to over 19 billion US dollars to date, pledges in funding for the initiative, until 2025 were made by several multilateral and bilateral organizations at the Summit – a major boost for the Great Green Wall.
• The Great Green Wall Accelerator aims to help all actors for the Great Green Wall (GGW) Initiative to better coordinate, monitor and measure the impact of their actions.
• The Great Green Wall Accelerator will be coordinated through the Pan Africa Agency for the Great Green Wall (PAAGGW), with initial support from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
• The Great Green Wall (GGW) Project to address desertification, land degradation and climate change in the Sahel region of Africa has hit a new low due to funds crunch.
• The Great Green Wall project is conceived by 11 countries (Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti) .
• located along the southern border of the Sahara and their international partners, is aimed at limiting the desertification of the Sahel zone.
• Led by the African Union, the initiative aims to transform the lives of millions of people by creating a mosaic of green and productive landscapes across North Africa.
• The initial idea of the GGW was to develop a line of trees from east to the west bordering the Saharan Desert.
• Its vision has evolved into that of a mosaic of interventions addressing the challenges facing the people in the Sahel and the Sahara.
• The African initiative is still only 15% complete.
• Once fully completed, the Wall will be the largest living structure on the planet – an 8,000 km natural wonder of the world stretching across the entire width of the continent.
• African countries during the UNCCCD COP14 sought global support in terms of finance to make the Wall a reality in the continent’s Sahel region by 2030.
• Sahel is a semiarid region of western and north-central Africa extending from Senegal eastward to Sudan.
• It forms a transitional zone between the arid Sahara (desert) to the north and the belt of humid savannas to the south.