ACReSAL At Midterm, What Is Actually Working In Nigeria

Halfway through its six-year run, Nigeria’s Agro-Climatic Resilience in Semi-Arid Landscapes programme, known as ACReSAL, is reporting numbers that would be remarkable if fully independent of the people reporting them. As of its April 2026 mid-term review, the programme says it has placed 922,717 hectares of degraded land under restoration, ninety-seven percent of its end target, four years ahead of the 2028 deadline it was given.

That claim, and the real evidence underneath parts of it, is worth walking through carefully, because the same program has also faced public accusations of exaggerated results in at least one state and was flagged as high risk by the World Bank’s own safeguard reviewers before it had planted a single tree.

What ACReSAL Actually Is

ACReSAL is a seven hundred million dollar credit from the World Bank’s International Development Association, approved in December 2021 and launched in 2022, running across nineteen northern Nigerian states plus the Federal Capital Territory. Its stated goal is to increase sustainable landscape management in targeted watersheds across northern Nigeria and build a longer-term institutional framework for climate-resilient land management.

The programme is split into components. Dryland management and desertification control account for roughly three hundred million dollars. Community climate resilience, meaning direct investment in farmer livelihoods, irrigation, and local infrastructure, accounts for close to that same amount. A smaller component funds institutional strengthening, and a contingency component exists for emergency response to extreme weather.

The programme sits inside a bigger picture. Nigeria has pledged to restore four million hectares of degraded land by 2030 under the AFR100 initiative and the Bonn Challenge. ACReSAL alone was tasked with delivering one million of those four million hectares, a quarter of the entire national commitment riding on a single World Bank-financed programme.

The Successes That Are Independently Checkable

Some of ACReSAL’s reported achievements rest on infrastructure that exists whether or not the headline numbers are perfectly precise. The programme has developed twenty Strategic Catchment Management Plans covering Nigeria’s five northern hydrological areas, nine of which were formally validated in a public workshop in March 2026 with World Bank and federal officials present. It has also built a Hydrological Modelling Centre now used to inform decisions on water allocation, flood control, and drought response, and helped install solar electrification across twelve federal agencies and state offices, cutting utility costs and emissions in buildings that previously ran on diesel generators.

In Kwara State, ACReSAL money has funded the rehabilitation of the Duku-Lade irrigation scheme, and Community Revolving Funds offer interest-free financing to organised farmer groups, work done in partnership with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. In Zamfara, the programme is funding a 5.6-kilometre erosion control structure across six vulnerable communities in Gusau, alongside community sensitisation on flood and erosion risk. Over two hundred seventy-five tractors have been distributed across fourteen states, a concrete, countable input that farmers either received or did not.

None of that requires taking the programme’s word for the exact hectare count. It is physical, visitable work.

Where Local Trust Broke Down

In July 2025, a video circulated in Kano alleging that the state’s ACReSAL project was cutting corners in three specific ways: drilling ordinary hand pumps instead of the solar-powered boreholes it had promised, listing beneficiaries of its Community Revolving Fund who did not actually exist, and never purchasing trucks and pay loaders it had budgeted for refuse evacuation work.

Kano’s ACReSAL office responded publicly, denying all three allegations and pointing to its Project Implementation Manual and Project Appraisal Document as governing every activity under a tripartite agreement between the federal government, the nineteen states, and the World Bank. Whether the specific allegations in that video were accurate or not, the fact that a programme built on trust with local communities needed a formal public rebuttal is itself a signal. Community scepticism about where the money actually goes has not been fully resolved by the programme’s own communications, at least not in every state.

The Risk The World Bank Flagged Before Anything Was Built

Long before the Kano controversy, the World Bank’s own Environmental and Social Management Framework for ACReSAL rated the programme as high risk overall, even though most individual subprojects were classed as only moderate or substantial risk on their own. The reason given was the sheer spread of the programme, hundreds of small interventions across nineteen states, whose combined social and environmental impact was judged more significant than any single site would suggest.

Separately, the World Bank’s own procurement strategy documents for the programme flagged insecurity in the participating northern states as a real constraint, warning it would likely reduce the number of firms from other parts of Nigeria and abroad willing to bid on ACReSAL contracts in the most affected areas. The programme has since brought in Search for Common Ground, an international peacebuilding organisation, to train ACReSAL staff across seven states on conflict monitoring, stakeholder mapping, and mediation, an acknowledgement that implementing a landscape restoration programme in parts of Zamfara, Borno, or Niger State is not the same exercise as implementing one in Kwara or Kaduna.

The Transparency Gap Worth Naming

Here is the honest complication in assessing ACReSAL’s record. The headline figures, the ninety-seven per cent hectare target, and the two hundred seventy-six per cent beneficiary overachievement come from the programme’s own reporting and its joint mid-term review with the World Bank, not from an independent civil society audit of the kind groups like BudgIT have built for other Nigerian public spending. Nigeria’s Great Green Wall programme, by comparison, has drawn independent scrutiny from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and the World Resources Institute, producing continent-wide progress figures that diverge meaningfully from individual countries’ own claims.

No comparable independent tracker for ACReSAL turned up in the course of researching this piece. That does not mean the reported numbers are wrong. The hectare restoration figures are cross-referenced against a World Bank-supervised mid-term review process, which carries real weight. But a programme moving three-quarters of a billion dollars through nineteen states with active insecurity in several of them is exactly the kind of programme that benefits from scrutiny beyond its own implementers and its funder working jointly, and that additional layer does not yet appear to exist in public form.

What This Means For Northern Communities

For a farmer in a community that has received a solar borehole, a revolving fund loan, or a distributed tractor, ACReSAL’s abstract hectare totals matter less than whether the specific thing promised to their community actually arrived and works. The Kano allegations, true or not in every detail, point to exactly that gap, between a programme’s aggregate national statistics and what any single village can verify with its own eyes.

The programme has real, checkable institutional achievements to its name: a hydrological modelling system, validated catchment plans, and completed infrastructure in multiple states. It also has an acknowledged security risk; it is actively managing rather than one it has resolved, and it has a reporting structure that runs through the same two institutions, the federal government and the World Bank, at every level. Both of those things can be true about the same seven hundred million dollar programme at the same time.