Dakar, Khoily Alpha, Senegal. FAO, CIFOR-ICRAF, Great Green Wall (GGW) institutions and partners convened for a Second Week on GGW in Senegal, as part of the EU-funded Knowledge for Great Green Wall Action (K4GGWA) project. The event brought together more than 50 stakeholders and partners from GGW national entities (focal points and monitoring representatives) and the Panafrican Agency of GGW, as well as civil society representatives and networks, private sector actors and entrepreneurs, international organizations, NGOs and financial partners. Itfollowed a successful first meeting held at the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in November 2023.

Reporting on updates at the Week on GGW, FAO presented its contributions mainly oriented towards building technical capacity and mobilising resources to support GGW to reach its objectives by 2030. Innovations and technical capacity improvements were summarised in a special edition of the Echoes of the GGW: Science, Technology and Innovations in support of the implementation of GGW, co-produced with the Panafrican Agency of GGW. Through its Action Against Desertification (AAD) programme, FAO updated stakeholders on trainings conducted and biophysical data collection and analyses, including through the use of Collect Earth tools, the Kobo restoration survey, and the unprecedented coordination between 30 African countries through the  Africa Open DEAL (Open Data for Environment, Agriculture and Land). A demonstration of the open access GGW land restoration monitoring App, which captures the collected field restoration data for visualisation and analysis of success or failure of restored sites, also took place.

Looking ahead, FAO highlighted the multi-country collaborative proposal with stakeholders, national and Panafrican agencies and other partners it is leading on Scaling up resilience in the GGW (SURAGGWA project). The project is currently under review by the Green Climate Fund and the process is expected to be finalised in the coming months, with approval by July 2025. It plans to restore up to 2 million hectares of degraded agro-sylvo-pastoral lands during the next 10 years, benefiting directly more than 3 million rural community farmers, and to support a regional monitoring across the GGW countries. This proposal represents the FAO's largest funding request for Africa, with a total estimated budget of 250 million US dollars, including a grant allocation of 150 million dollars from the Green Climate Fund and 100 million dollars in states in-kind contributions and co-financing. FAO’s efforts come under the United Nations Decade for Ecosystem Restoration, jointly led by the FAO and the United Nations Environment Programme, marking an important opportunity and framework for intensifying interventions in scaling up land restoration, improving partnerships and coordination, monitoring progress, and supporting countries to access more climate finance.

The gathering also provided an opportunity for FAO to take stakeholders and partners to the field to view first-hand the implementation of large-scale land restoration with rural communities. In Khoily Alpha, participants were able to observe a 1,000 ha of degraded natural reserve village land restored by FAO-AAD over three years (2017-2020) with seeding/planting mix herbaceous fodder and native woody species. In addition to restoring plant biodiversity, the management plan aimed to respond to the request of the Khoily Alpha village community to re-introduce wildlife, which previously thrived in the project area. The participants witnessed the successful reintroduction of wildlife species including oryxes (Oryx dammah), which reproduced four-fold since the initial release of four males and two females in May 2020. These integrated interventions combining technical capacity, community mobilisation, biophysical and socio-ecological restoration and wildlife re-introduction were informative, educative and greatly appreciated by participants who widely recognized the relevance of AAD approach and called for its replications elsewhere in the GGW.

In Senegal, the National GGW agency already aims to extend the same type of Reserve restoration along the GGW and to re-create a wildlife corridor reaching the Niokolo-Koba National Park in the Southeast. Data show s there are nearly 100 GGW restoration sites for a total over 40 000 ha of agro-sylvo-pastoral lands under restoration in Senegal.

The K4GGWA project comes as a direct response to consolidate and capitalise knowledge gained through such successful interventions and expand them further afield as solutions to the challenges identified in the latest GGW impact evaluation. Its implementation ensures continuity, coordination, and complementarity with other GGW interventions, providing knowledge products and capacities that accelerate action towards its targets of restoring 100 million ha, sequestering 250 million of CO₂ and creating 10 million green jobs. FAO remains committed to working closely with all stakeholders to achieve the ambitious objectives of the GGW by 2030.