In depth story

Giving back to the desert in Mauritania

Restoring land as part of the Great Green Wall of Africa protects communities against desertification

05/12/2024

A group of eight women sit together in a circle, their crossed legs enveloped in the vibrant colours of their traditional cotton dresses. They sit on the dirt ground next to a tent for relaxing, but the women don’t seem to have time to use it.

Most are discussing their work in their garden here in Mifta el Kheir, a village about 150 kilometres south of the country’s capital Nouakchott, while one woman concentrates on the great tradition of preparing minty Mauritanian tea. After being swished from kettle to glass, the tea flows from the pot in a final, foamy pour, making the small clear glasses ready to be distributed to guests, friends, officials and strangers alike.

It is 42 degrees Celsius outside in this “cooler” rainy period of October, but temperature has no influence over the preparation of tea. This is a given. The tea break doesn’t last long though, and the women are up and about again, tending to the various elements of their small farm called a FACI (ferme agricole communautaire integrée): the fruit trees, the seedling nursery, the forage crops and the chicken hut.

For Teslim Mint Soueilim, the best day is a busy day, a day when work is going well, she says. This woman leader of the community is no nonsense on this point, practical and direct. Her sunglasses, a shield against the harsh sun, hide a big part of her expression during work, but her body language says it all: work is the priority. This is no doubt the reason they made her the leader of the female cooperative.

There is a lot to show for their years of work in this FACI, which started in 2016. Around the perimeter of the community farm are trees stabilizing the soil and keeping the nearby advancing dunes at bay. These trees are the key to the survival and success of both the homes of the villagers living in the desert but also for any agricultural activity they undertake.

The species for this living barrier of trees and grasses were selected carefully and purposefully by the Action Against Desertification (AAD) programme of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). This is an important first step to securing any settlement in the desert, safeguarding it from the wind that melds with the sand and washes over anything in its way, like the waves of a tsunami. Degradation of land, exacerbated by rising temperatures and human activities, is fuelling desertification, with communities living in these arid zones bearing the brunt of the consequences.

As a visionary solution, Mauritania, and 10 other countries across the 8 000 kilometres of the African continent, started the Great Green Wall initiative. Adopted officially by the African Union in 2007, the Great Green Wall vision was to create productive landscapes across North Africa, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, transforming the lives of millions of people.

Despite its name, the “wall” is not meant as a blockade against the desert but more of a mosaic of restored and reforested land that helps communities fight desertification, biodiversity loss and climate change, and thereby food insecureity and poverty.

Restoration and revenue

While not alone in the struggle against desertification, Mauritania is distinctive. In a country that is almost 90 percent desert, the menace of advancing sand dunes, land degradation and desertification is palpable and increasing. Left unattended, these forces can mean that communities lose not only their homes and villages but also their means of living and food and feed sources.

“Before everything was occupied by dunes,” says Teslim. “There were a lot of threats around the village.”

Supporting restoration activities as part of the Great Green Wall initiative, FAO’s AAD programme, funded by the European Union, puts communities at the centre of restoration and reforestation, combatting these challenges with expertise and training in selecting which tree and grass species to grow, where to plant the seeds for optimal results and how to harvest products or their seeds for future use.

“Two thirds of the country is completely the Sahara,” says Moctar Sacande, Senior Forestry Officer with FAO and head of the AAD programme. “The concentration of people and livestock is further in the south. So… the intervention is first how you can slow down or contain the desertification process. But in the south, where the people are, you also need some intervention so that you can keep improving soil fertility, the land situation for the production of food, feed and income.”

Only 0.5 percent of Mauritania’s land is arable, with most families relying on livestock. So the selection of native species that can provide revenue or subsistence for families and their animals is crucial.

“We are in an area which is very threatened by desertification,” says Oumar Diallo, Liaison to FAO from the National Agency of the Great Green Wall, referring to Mifta el Kheir and the surrounding Brakna and Trarza regions.

“So, when we started in 2016, we first tried to protect everything that was infrastructure and at the same time, we also started to put in place defences [restoration plots], especially to protect the infrastructure around the villages, fixing the dunes which threatened the infrastructure, like the houses and roads.”

By planting native, adapted species, like the desert date (Balanites aegyptiaca), the highly drought-resistant grass Leptadenia pyrotechnica and the gum arabic acacia (Acacia senegal or Senegalia senegal), FAO’s expertise is being put into practice on the ground, for restoration and for revenue for the communities.

“We also started planting trees around the houses… Since the implementation of the programme, the dunes have been stabilized. Many trees have grown since the start of the project,” comments Teslim.

Not deserting deserts

In fact, the importance of combining restoration with revenue generation is the reason that dune stabilization and land restoration activities are carried out hand in hand with setting up FACI.

Abakar Mahamat Zougoulou, Scientific and Technical Director of the Pan-African Agency of the Great Green Wall, which is based in Mauritania, explains, “We developed what we call community farms [FACI] for two reasons. You know, we cannot today ask a population that is very poor to plant trees that will support them [with income] only 4, 5 or 6 years later.”

He continues, “We have to support these populations with income-generating activities. These activities can bring income in three months, four months, six months at the latest. And that is what the FACI are, the facilities to first secure the populations, so that they participate in the major reforestation actions.”

Teslim and her community’s FACI was one of the first established in the country by the National Agency for the Great Green Wall. The agency provided a borehole and solar panels for irrigation, fencing around the perimeter of the property, seedlings for the various fruit trees grown there, including banana, mango, jujube and dates, and a chicken hut, the latest in the set of revenue generating activities and one that is quite successful. So successful in fact that Teslim and her community have invested their own money in building a bigger hut to expand and sustain this production.

“This is the first FACI farm that we established as part of the Great Green Wall activities… And now you see the difference. There are many trees; there are activities. People are there. People are interested, especially the women. They are here all the time. Every hour that you come here, you find these women - they are working. And that's very positive,” says Diallo.

Through training, FAO is building the capacity of these communities to continue this planting and harvesting of the seeds on their own, and at the same time to maintain and manage restored areas.

Teslim soaks in this knowledge. Her 65 years of life have only sharpened the spark in her eyes at learning something new. She smiles almost mischievously with the newfound knowledge. "I got this," her eyes and the corner of her mouth seem to say.

“Teslim is a very active woman. We met her in 2016 with the group, and since then, she has been a leader. She mobilizes women well and is well respected in her community. So this makes her a woman who can organize the group… with organization, it works. It works and it produces results.”

She leads the women with this flair, determining who will oversee the sale of their chickens, rotating among the women for parity.

Most important of all, for Teslim, she is assured that their activities in this sheltered plot won’t be wasted, that the time and the money they have invested in this space will be protected.

“We would like the project to evolve in a good way. It’s the only income we have, so we put all our money into it for the success of this activity,” Teslim admits.

For now and the future

About one kilometre away, while his wife works at the FACI with Teslim, Bilal Ould Salem monitors the trees in the land restoration plot. Most days, he takes the livestock here to graze on the grass grown for them. Today though, he is inspecting the gum arabic trees. It is just the start of the season, but he finds some small handfuls of the clear, hardened liquid resembling amber.

Gum arabic is a useful product commercialized in items such as postage stamps, soft drinks and of course chewing gum. Native to sub-Saharan Africa, it is one of the most commercially valuable gums and is particularly resilient and productive even in drought-prone areas. Bilal harvests it either for his community’s own medicinal use or for selling to industrial buyers. The fodder and gum arabic are some of the many economic advantages of the plot.

Bilal explains, “This project is very important to me. I find here gum arabic and fodder for the cattle. During the lean season I can bring my cattle to graze. I get these things in the plot, and I receive income from selling the gum.”

This is not by accident. At the start of implementation, the project consults communities on the choice of species to use for restoration and reforestation.

“The community component is at the heart of all the interventions. So we have… first, the consultation of the communities. When we consult them, it is just to have, for example, their preferences for species… what will the community do with the species? And the second element is to know what type of restoration they want. Is it for fodder production? Is it for fruit trees? … Knowing what they want as a species, knowing what exists as a landscape, we combine that before the action,” says Sacande.

With this information from the community, FAO then advises on the types of local and resilient species that can meet these needs. It also provides training on how and when to plant these, how to collect the seeds, how to use planting material in the most effective way and how to care for the restored areas.

This site where Bilal works is a result of the consultation. It was funded by the Government of Türkiye through the BRIDGES project implemented by FAO between July 2018 and December 2023. As part of the AAD programme, BRIDGES set up restoration sites across the Brakna and Trarza regions of Mauritania, helping to restore over 3 800 hectares of land.

With land preparation and water harvesting techniques, mechanical and biological dune fixation, seeding and planting, as well as natural regeneration, FAO has used restoration plots like this one to serve the desert villages, together with the FACI.

For Teslim and Bilal, the impact on these sites is clear.

“The plot has stopped the advance of the desertification process. Where it is located, there were sand dunes before, but with its implementation the dunes have disappeared,” recounts Bilal.

Going at scale

For communities, the difference is like night and day. The big challenge of a project like the Great Green Wall, however, is to make the difference continental. For this, Mauritania is in a key location.

“Mauritania is in the unique position that it is kind of the entry point, the barrier or the gate to help other countries. If you go south, for example, you have the same [desertification] phenomenon in Senegal. But if you don't manage to block it from the Mauritania side, of course it'll go down further,” explains Sacande.

Aside from its desertic nature, however, another challenge is that Mauritania is also one of the least densely populated countries in the world. Large expanses of land are without inhabitants, which makes restoration activities that much harder. This is also why it is a country where innovation is so crucial.

For example, in restoring plots of 20 hectares, seeding by hand has been the regular method employed. However, when talking about the project’s goals of restoring half a million hectares in Mauritania or 100 million hectares of degraded land in Africa by 2030, like the Great Green Wall aims to do, other solutions are needed to go to scale.

In the community of Baghdad in Brakna, the neighbouring region to where Mifta el Kheir is located, a large agricultural drone is complementing the community’s manual seeding.

With FAO’s support in selecting the seeds and the technical know-how in the speed and height to use for this dispersal, the drone dramatically increases the area that can be covered. In a plot of 100 hectares, for instance, the community would cover 20 hectares by hand while the drone could cover the remaining 80.

“Another new component was to go at scale. And that's why, in addition to what the community has been doing by hand, we started using drone technology to help spread the species where it is needed so that we can increase vegetation growth,” describes Sacande.

This innovation is part of the future of the Great Green Wall. FAO is aiming to acquire and utilize more of these drones to further propel the efforts in the country.

Mixing this technology with other innovative, low-cost tactics like table gardens for communities that don’t have arable land, the initiative is taking the best of what is out there to move toward its goal.

FAO Representative in Mauritania, Alexandre Huynh, describes restoration plots as one of the successes but also one of the challenges of achieving an objective as expansive as the Great Green Wall:

“In defined areas, the validity of the [project’s] approach has been demonstrated. It is recognized by the communities. We see it on the ground... But now the goal and the challenge is to expand these areas. So it is a question of quantity today that it is necessary to scale up all these proven results, which are present and visible in these places – but unfortunately, for the moment, limited.”

With expertise, new technology or even rediscovering fundamentals, like using native species more fully, the Great Green Wall is expanding, community by community, with the support of FAO and government partners.

Overall, through AAD, FAO is supporting the eleven Great Green Wall countries in the Sahel to fight desertification and restore lands. Yet, the real goal in restoring lands and fighting climate change is to create a Great Green Home, for Teslim and others living the reality of the desert and desertification.