Scaling-Up Resilience in Africa’s Great Green Wall (SURAGGWA)

SURAGGWA’s objective is to enhance ecological and climate resilience across Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal, while substantially increasing carbon sequestration through landscape restoration.

The Sahelian countries within the Great Green Wall (GGW) region are among the poorest and most vulnerable to climate change. Their economies largely depend on agriculture, livestock, and forestry, with over 70 per cent of rural communities reliant on rainfed agriculture. Climate change further exacerbates ecosystem degradation, biodiversity loss, and the vulnerability of agro-silvopastoral landscapes, threatening food security and the sustainability of local livelihoods.

The programme will restore degraded agro-silvo-pastoral landscapes to build climate resilience and mitigation capacities, develop climate-resilient, low-emission Non-Timber Forest Product (NTFP) value chains to enhance market access and financial inclusion for vulnerable communities, and strengthen GGW institutions to improve coordination, monitoring, resource mobilisation, and knowledge management

The programme supports the African Union-led Great Green Wall (GGW) initiative by enhancing ecological and climate resilience. It contributes to the GGW goals of restoring 100 million hectares of degraded land, creating 10 million new jobs and sequestering 250 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030 through large-scale land restoration efforts.