The Great Green Wall of Africa was announced by President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal at the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference on 16 December 2009. Although this is still just a plan looking for funders, the way in which it has been handled to date gives an insight into the difficulty Africa has in implementing.
The Background
This Great Green Wall of Africa, aimed at halting desertification, has its origins in a Summit of Leaders and Heads of States of the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD), held in June 2005 in Ougadougou (Burkina Faso). The summit adopted the “Great Green Wall initiative as one of its priority programmes”. Just these few phrases illustrate shortcoming often seen in Africa. Calling it an initiative and a priority programme distract from the need to do things as one would in a project or a task.
The Sahara and Sahel Observatory (SSO) was “tasked with developing the concept” with a focus on implementation and its sustainable development impact. The report on what became the The Great Green Wall Initiative of the Sahara and the Sahel (GGWISS) was published in 2008 and claims to “summarise the results obtained from available documentation and consultations with key experts and practitioners. It draws lessons from past experiences while considering current development needs.”
However it makes no mention of the Great Green Wall of China which has already planted 500,000 square kilometers of forest since 1978 in a desert encroachment project and has already identified problems
The report clearly tried to collect some of the many desertification projects that governments and donors had invested in over the decades and work these into a green belt which would combine them to form the basis of a Great Green Wall.
Then the AU and the EU became involved, which lead to a report in June 2009 which recommended
“cross-sectoral actions aimed at the sustainable land- and natural resource management.”
and the investigation of
“possible avenues for implementation, including on institutional and funding mechanisms, inter alia, to complement FAO’s contribution for the project”.
The Problem
It was on the basis of this report that President Wade presented the project at Copenhagen – however his presentation and the title of the project lead to press reports that still refer to the physical planting of trees as the projects focus. So the actual nature of the initiative is not correctly communicated which could lead to problems during implementation.
This story has shown how we manage to delay the actual action by systemising project development. The various objectives added to the project including carbon mitigation, poverty alleviation, sustainable land management, improved farming practices and natural resource management all lead to increasing complexity and a loss of focus. The final plan defines a two year planning period before the actual work can be launched at initiation workshops.
All this effects those trying to implement the project as well as the funders and has lead to the situation where, five years on, funding has not yet been been sourced
There is no doubt that there are those who will refute the validity of this argument, but it is worth noting that, to the author, this is just another example of how we Africans have developed an affinity to strategise and plan but have less skill and interest in the implementation of real projects. The author is willing to acknowledge this is a generalisation and not always true.
Photo by Travel Aficionado in Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
