Trying to fill the cracks in Africa’s Great Green Wall
Daniel Nelson
Forest precedes Man, desert follows. That’s what Africa’s Great Green Wall is designed to counteract
It’s an 8,000 mile, transAfrican reforestation drive that aims to outstrip Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to become the largest living structure on Earth.
The plan is to stop the Sahara drifting south, create 10 million jobs, restore 100 million hectares of degraded land and sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon.
Unfortunately, it’s not going well. Not enough money, not enough commitment. Only about 15 per cent of the tree-planting target has been met since the African Union backed the idea in 2007.
So singer-activist Inna Modja has travelled its route through Senegal, her homeland, Mali, Nigeria, Niger and Ethiopia to make a film drawing attention to the ambitious project: “I can use my voice as a contribution to share what’s at stake.”
She talks to farmers, children and Wall employees and jams with musicians (because she was also compiling an album), gives a running commentary on the trip and the project as well as honest reactions to the stories she hears: “I have nothing in my pocket,” says a would-be migrant heading for Europe but stranded in Niger. “I want to go back to Mali but I am ashamed. I have lost so much.”
Perhaps with an eye on Western audiences, the film emphasises that degraded land means lost livelihoods and therefore increased emigration: “People are always asking themselves ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ For some people there is no choice. They have to go.”
For a long time, she admits, “the African dream has been ‘out of the continent’.” And with birth rates still high, 60 million people could migrate by 2045.
So though she’s hopeful, she’s realistic – about, for example, the impact of conflict in Mali and Nigeria. In Ethiopia, she expresses “mind-blowing’ surprise at the greenness of Tigray: “It is the perfect example to the rest of the Sahel that we can make a change.” But soon after the film’s first screen in London in November 2020 came the news that Tigray was in political turmoil.
In the same week the magazine Nature reported that “the project has struggled to reach key goals. Less than one-fifth of the designated land area has been restored or rehabilitated. The African Union’s top decision makers don’t see the green wall as a priority, and inter-national donors seem reluctant to commit further funding.”
Inna Modja has done her bit. Of course, it’s not enough to get the project moving again, but it’s a start.
* For more information, including how to arrange a screening, visit greatgreenwall.org/film