The Great Green Wall was conceptualized in the 1970s as an effort to halt land degradation amid record droughts and concerns of deforestation. In 2007, The Africa Union expanded the vision for the Great Green Wall to an integrated approach to landscape restoration that incorporates regenerative agriculture to reach environmental and socio-economic goals.
Senegal is part of the GGW zone and embodies the compounding and interconnected issues that face smallholder farmers and pastoralist communities across the region including:
1) Severe food insecurity: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that by 2030 Africa will lose two-thirds of its arable land if the march of desertification — the spread of arid, desert-like areas of land — is not stopped
2) Increasing dryland: disappearance of trees and vegetation due to overgrazing, loss of soil fertility, need for fuelwood, and climate impacts.
3) Increased conflicts: clashes between farmers and herder over limited natural resources
4) Livelihoods challenges: loss of livestock; dropping production and productivity of agricultural activities and malnutrition
5) Migration: due to all of the problems above, and a growing youth population with no access to meaningful work.
The forest garden aims to solve each of these problems with a single solution planted on 1 hectare of land. TREES is working with thousands of farmers in the area to develop forest garden projects, that not only restore the landscape through tree planting in diverse forest gardens, but also equip farmers with the skills to improve soils, produce an abundance of fruits and vegetables and grow the natural resources they need most.
Trees for the Future (often stylized as TREES) is a non-profit organization founded on August 14, 1989 by Dave and Grace Deppner. Headquartered in Maryland, USA, TREES works with farmers, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, to train them in agroforestry and sustainable land use. Their flagship method, known as the Forest Garden Approach, allows farmers to transform degraded land into biodiverse, productive landscapes that support food, carbon capture, and long-term soil health.
Over its more than 30-year history, Trees for the Future has made major strides: by 2003, they had planted 30 million trees, and later surpassed 100 million.
In 2021, they set a bold goal to plant one billion trees by 2030, aligning with the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. In February 2024, TREES was officially recognized as a UN World Restoration Flagship, underlining their status as one of the most ambitious and large-scale ecosystem restoration efforts in the world.
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