Africa’s Great Green Mirage? Assessing the disconnect between global finance and local implementation in Africa’s Great Green Wall

The Great Green Wall of the Sahara and Sahel – also known as Africa’s Great Green Wall – aims to restore a band of land traversing the African continent south of the Sahara. Despite billions of dollars of pledges in donor funding, progress on restoration has been notoriously slow. This article explores the difficulty of translating financial pledges at the global level into local-level socioecological change. Using mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, we focus our analysis on the case of Senegal – one of the countries most devoted to project implementation. We find that rural communities benefit economically and socially from the project through periodic employment activities and social services. However, satellite imagery and field observations demonstrate low long-term ecological impact. Examining project reforestation parcels in northern Senegal, our results show that only two out of 36 assessed planting parcels showed significant (p < 0.05) greening trends since planting, with just one parcel demonstrating greening beyond what would be expected from changes in rainfall alone. Qualitatively examining the socioecological reasons behind this lack of greening, we find 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. In contrast to spectacular financial pledges often left unmet and spectacular planting campaigns often yielding low survival, it is the mundane everyday elements of project implementation – employment, gardens, medical care – that have real impact in the eyes of residents. Until the spectacle of “spectacular” finance is transcended, we conclude, Africa’s GGW will remain a mirage.