Nigeria’s Great Green Wall Fights The Desert

Jabiru Muhammed stands beside a tree planted in his village of Garbadu, in Jigawa State, as part of a tree planting drive under Nigeria’s Great Green Wall programme. Garbadu is home to roughly six thousand people who depend on farming, and many had abandoned their fields as the land around them dried out and stopped producing.

Nigeria loses about thirty-five thousand hectares of land to desertification every year, according to reporting on the programme. Across the country’s north, desert encroachment now threatens the livelihoods of an estimated forty million rural Nigerians, most of them farmers and herders with nowhere else to grow food.

What Nigeria Actually Committed To

In 2017, Nigeria pledged to restore four million hectares of degraded land by 2030 under the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative and the Bonn Challenge, alongside its role in the continent-wide Great Green Wall programme. The centrepiece of Nigeria’s contribution is a planned one thousand three hundred fifty-nine-kilometre shelterbelt of trees running from Kebbi State in the northwest to Borno State in the northeast, meant to act as a windbreak slowing the desert’s southward creep.

The National Agency for the Great Green Wall, the federal body responsible for implementation, marked its tenth anniversary in 2025 with a nationwide tree-planting exercise, a sign the programme still has institutional weight behind it for more than a decade.

Real Progress, Unevenly Distributed

Villages like Garbadu are the programme working as intended. Farmers who had walked away from unproductive land are returning to it as windbreaks and replanted vegetation slow erosion and help the soil hold moisture again.

Nigeria’s own agency has reported roughly fifty per cent progress toward its national restoration commitment, a figure worth treating carefully since it comes from the implementing agency itself rather than independent verification. For comparison, the continent-wide Great Green Wall initiative, spanning eleven Sahel countries, had restored only around eighteen per cent of its overall one hundred million hectare target as of recent assessments, a gap that has drawn criticism from the United Nations and prompted a restructuring effort called the Great Green Wall Accelerator to improve monitoring and funding coordination.

The Problem Trees Cannot Fix

The hardest obstacle facing Nigeria’s share of the programme is not ecological; it is security. The shelterbelt route runs directly through Zamfara, Katsina, and Borno States, where insurgency and banditry have made large stretches of land difficult or dangerous to access. Reporting on the initiative describes insecurity as one of the most serious risks to the programme’s long-term sustainability, with armed groups restricting access to restoration sites in exactly the states where the shelterbelt most needs to be completed.

That leaves Nigeria’s restoration effort caught between two timelines. Trees planted in stable areas like Jigawa are maturing and showing results. Trees that were meant to close the gap through Zamfara, Katsina, and Borno remain far harder to plant and protect, which means the shelterbelt’s most vulnerable stretches are also its least secure ones.

What This Means For Northern Communities

For a farming family in Nigeria’s north, restored land is not an abstract climate benefit; it is the difference between staying on a farm and abandoning it. Researchers studying the programme’s economics have found that every dollar invested in land restoration in the Sahel returns several dollars in benefits once both market value and non-market ecosystem services are counted, with Nigeria identified as one of the countries with the highest potential for long-term carbon storage from the effort.

Realising that potential depends on something restoration research cannot solve on its own: enough security on the ground for the trees to actually get planted and survive to maturity.