The United Nations and partners have unveiled a $78 million programme to restore degraded land and improve livelihoods for five million people across Africa’s Great Green Wall.

The Global Environment Facility is providing the funding, while the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) will implement eight of the programme’s 10 projects and coordinate delivery across the nine countries.

The GEF $78 million grant will revitalise Africa’s Great Green Wall Initiative, according to UNEP. UNEP said the initiative would restore more than 270,000 hectares of degraded land across nine Sahel countries.

The funding is a major lifeline for the ambitious project, bringing total pooled resources to more than $500 million when combined with co-financing from partners. The targeted funding aims to address severe land degradation, drought, and climate vulnerability across nine Sahelian countries.

The initiative brings together nine national governments stretching from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa with UNEP, the West African Development Bank, and the Pan-African Agency of the Great Green Wall.

The nine African countries are Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal.

UNEP will implement eight of the programme’s 10 projects and coordinate regional delivery, while BOAD will implement the remaining two.

More than half of the people expected to benefit from the programme are women. The initiative is designed to combat land degradation while expanding economic opportunities for communities facing growing climate and livelihood pressures.

The Great Green Wall is one of Africa’s flagship environmental initiatives and seeks to restore degraded landscapes across the Sahel while improving food security and resilience.

The new investment comes as desertification, drought and climate change increasingly threaten agricultural livelihoods across the region.

Developments around the Great Green Wall are directly relevant to Nigeria because the country is one of the African states participating in the wider continental initiative.

(NAN)