28/07/2018, SENEGAL, KOYLI ALPHA.
Men and women from the community work in the trees nursery created in the village as part of the Great Green Wall Initiative.
One of the main focuses of the Great Green Wall project in Senegal is to create a community-based natural reserve at Kholy-Alpha, in the rural community of Mboula. The reserve aims to improve the living conditions of populations, improve biodiversity conservation and promote sustainable management of the land via a number of initiatives, such as developing ecotourism and non-wood forest products value chains.

Salif Ba, one of the guardian of the reserve says: "The Action Against Desertification Project is very important for us. We are the first to be hired by FAO as guardians of the nature reserve. We are ten guardians in total. It all started with the installation of a nursery that is functional until now. It is this nursery that is the source of all these recorded results. Then there was the garden where mango tree, lemon tree, jujube, grapefruit, etc. were planted."


The Great Green Wall initiative is a pan-African programme to improve the resilience and restore the productivity of agro-sylvo-pastoral landscapes affected by Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought in Africa's drylands around the Sahara.

The initiative is an African Union programme that brings together more than 20 countries from the Sahel-Saharan region, along with a mosaic of regional and international organisations, including FAO.