K4GGWA - Knowledge Brokerage for the Great Green Wall Initiative

K4GGWA – Knowledge for Great Green Wall Action – is a knowledge-brokering initiative led by CIFOR-ICRAF and the FAO. Borne out of a need to enhance communication and strategy alignment across the Great Green Wall stakeholder network, K4GGWA facilitates knowledge-exchange and is executed across three major axes:

Enhance uptake and effectiveness of sustainable land management, land restoration and integrated landscape management practices - improving regional, national and subnational actors’ capacities to share lessons learned, co-develop and access learning products, and engage stakeholders in practice-based learning trajectories.
Improved land health and vegetation monitoring and intervention targeting - development and application of frameworks/tools for monitoring changes in land health.
Enhanced policy and institutional enabling environment for sustainable management and livelihoods - emphasis on the need to improve GGW institutional, governance, advocacy and awareness dimensions.

Grounded in the SHARED framework, K4GGWA aims to foster inclusive and intersectoral relationship-building across the decision-making cycle, ensuring evidence is made available in an accessible form to a broad range of stakeholders.

What is the Great Green Wall Initiative?

The Great Green Wall Initiative (GGWI) is one of Africa’s most ambitious restoration projects. Conceived in 2005 by the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD), this visionary effort originally sought to form a political bloc of Sahelian states to support economic development.

By 2007, the initiative had evolved into a bold ecological vision under African Union (AU) leadership: an 8000km-long, 15km-wide living green belt spanning the continent from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, restoring degraded lands, combatting desertification, and enhancing livelihoods across 11 core member states.

With the establishment of the Pan African Agency for the Great Green Wall (PA-GGW) in 2010, the GGWI gained a legal and institutional backbone, and a Harmonized Regional Strategy followed in 2012 to guide its implementation. The concept of the wall slowly morphed into a more adaptable approach with a socioeconomic focus: a mosaic of forested areas interwoven with farmland and grassland, spanning 780 million hectares and providing benefits to local communities. In 2020, ten years on from the formation of the PA-GGW, the Great Green Wall Implementation Status Report was published, highlighting the initiative’s progress and challenges. The Report highlighted several critical bottlenecks and proposed strategic actions to overcome them.

Lessons Learned: Bottlenecks in Implementation

The 2020 Status Report laid bare the challenges confronting the GGW. While some progress had been made in restoring degraded lands and fostering community resilience, weak and uncoordinated governance structures led to poor practical implementation, inadequate monitoring and evaluation, and diminished donor confidence in project outcomes. These four overarching issues are highlighted in the Report as:

Governance issues causing institutional challenges:
- Poor coordination across countries and stakeholders led to duplication of efforts and wasted resources.
Limited Monitoring and Evaluation:
- A lack of standardised tools to measure the impact of interventions hindered meaningful progress assessment.
Funding challenges:
- Despite significant international pledges, accessing and efficiently utiliing funds proved challenging.
Technical challenges and survival rates of tree planting projects:
- Practical implementation challenges including choosing appropriate tree species, procuring quality seeds and seedlings, and limited management and monitoring following planting activities has lead to poor survival rates.

These challenges underscored the need for inclusive, coherent and coordinated approach to achieving the GGW’s ambitious goals.

The Great Green Wall Accelerator: A New Vision for Implementation

In 2021 at the One Planet Summit, the joint UNCCD-PA-GGW GGW Accelerator was launched, to respond to some of the challenges highlighted in the 2020 Status Report. Designed to reinvigorate the GGW effort, the Accelerator identified key strategic areas as:

One of the most important initiatives launched under the GGW Accelerator is the Harmonised Results Management Framework (HRMF), coupled with the GGW Observatory (Strategic Actions (1), (2) and (4) of the GGW Accelerator). Together, these platforms work to harmonise impact reporting and create a centralised platform for tracking progress against financial commitments and international frameworks such as Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) under the UNCCD and the SDGs. Pitched to high-level stakeholders (e.g., National Coalitions, PA-GGW appointments, donors etc) and consisting of broad, macro-indicators (e.g., Number of hectares under XYZ restoration method), the GGW Accelerator aims to strengthen a nested reporting process, whereby local reporting gets aggregated and reported upwards to the HRMF.

Such a strategy requires a strong, interconnected network of stakeholders, from local to supra-national. This is where Knowledge for Great Green Wall Action (K4GGWA) comes to bear.

K4GGWA: Strengthening Stakeholder Networks Through Knowledge Exchange

The K4GGWA initiative, led by CIFOR-ICRAF and FAO, was designed as a technical backstopping provision to the GGW Accelerator’s strategic framework. K4GGWA acts as a knowledge-brokering device, bridging gaps in understanding and strategy across the GGW network. Working directly with actors as diverse as PA-GGW appointments, to regional governments, NGOs, CSOs, landholders, and everyone in between, the initiative is forging and fortifying connections across the GGW’s vast stakeholder network.

Operating across three major axes, K4GGWA aims to:

Enhance Sustainable Practices: Improve the uptake and effectiveness of land restoration and landscape management techniques by facilitating lessons learned and co-developing learning products with stakeholders.
Improve Monitoring: Develop and implement tools for tracking changes in land health and targeting interventions.
Strengthen Policy and Governance: Build institutional capacities, improve governance, and advocate for policies that support sustainable management and livelihoods.

Stakeholder Network

K4GGWA is about fostering connections and ensuring that every decision made across the GGW aligns with a shared vision for sustainable development. Grounded in the Stakeholder Approach to Risk Informed and Evidence Based Decision Making (SHARED) framework, K4GGWA follows a conceptual approach that emphasises vertically-integrated decision-making. This means bridging gaps not just across sectors but across all levels of governance, from local communities to international agencies. Underpinning the SHARED framework is the principle that knowledge-exchange and evidence generation should be a people-centred and demand driven process. This is the underlying message in the African Union’s recent GGW Initiative Strategy and Ten-Year Implementation Framework (2024 - 2034): “To accomplish the Strategy’s vision and objectives, a truly inclusive multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral and multi-scale engagement process is needed for planning, decision making, and implementation. In addition, evidence-based monitoring, reflection, and accountability for flexible and adaptive management is key to defining the Strategy’s adoption and long-term success”.

To accomplish the Strategy’s vision and objectives, a truly inclusive multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral and multi-scale engagement process is needed for planning, decision making, and implementation. In addition, evidence-based monitoring, reflection, and accountability for flexible and adaptive management is key to defining the Strategy’s adoption and long-term success.

By taking a process of co-design and co-creation, K4GGWA aligns with the Accelerator’s mission while addressing one of the GGW’s most pressing challenges, the need for unity and coherence in action. Faithful to SHARED principles, activities for K4GGWA during the first year were focussed on canvassing the existing stakeholder network to understand needs, gaps and priorities, laying the groundwork for year two, and ensuring activities meet needs articulated by stakeholders.

K4GGWA To-Date: What Was Achieved During the First Year of Implementation?

K4GGWA’s first year (2023-2024) was by and large a successful one.

A keystone activity which formed the basis for subsequent activities was the Capacity Needs Assessment led by the FAO with contributions from CIFOR-ICRAF. Six key categories of priority learning areas based on stakeholder input were identified, to which K4GGWA activities are tailored:

Technical learning needs and adoption of good practices
Process learning needs for stakeholder engagement and collaborative planning
Monitoring and evaluation learning needs
Value chain development
Managerial and coordination learning needs
Institutional learning needs of stakeholders

One such exciting activity was the launch of the Digital Learning Campus, a co-designed platform that provides accesss to learning products developed to meet priority learning areas, as well as blended learning trajectories on sustainable land management practices. The Campus hosts training modules drawing on a range of available resources from both CIFOR-ICRAF and the FAO, such as the SHARED training (programmed for release early 2024), and Collect Earth tools from the FAO.

Trainings on Collect Earth tools and biophysical data collection were conducted by the FAO with GGW National Agencies and practitioners, strengthening capacities for participatory monitoring efforts. Data collected was fed into the FAO’s Google Earth Engine-based GGW Restoration Monitoring App. Socio-economic data surveys were also carried out, supplementing biophysical data to create a strong socio-ecological baseline for monitoring efforts.

These activities were complemented by CIFOR-led training activities on the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) for biophysical data collection, and the highly-lauded Regreening App, one of CIFOR’s flagship socio-ecological citizen-science data collection tools. Additional functionalities were developed for the Regreening App including extended language support and tree-mapping features, and the App reached a significant milestone of 5000 downloads.

Perhaps the most exciting achievement for K4GGWA during its first year, was the co-design and deployment of the K4GGWA Knowledge Platform. The platform is an integrated digital toolbox that includes dashboards on landscape analytics, and a content hub with guidance materials, tutorials and impact stories. The Dashboard feature on the platform hosts interactive maps generated using state-of-the-art remote sensing analysis and participatory data collection techniques, including LDSF and Regreening App data. It aims to integrate diverse data streams (e.g., Regreening App data, LDSF data, FAO-generated maps and GEE assets) and function as a retrievable data-source itself, with the creation of API endpoints which stakeholders can leverage for specific applications.

Ancillary materials including guidance documents and tutorials will be developed to support stakeholders in using dashboard analytics for a range of decision-making contexts. The content hub will feature restoration stories and explainer-pieces on monitoring indicators, linking in content from the Digital Learning Campus and feature FAO-led work, such as the drone-seeded restoration campaign in Mauritania in 2024.

Both the Digital Learning Campus and the K4GGWA Platform serve as critical instruments for K4GGWA’s policy, outreach and advocacy activities. For example, the forthcoming release of the SHARED training module on the DLC is a collaborative effort with stakeholders designed to hone skills in engagement, facilitation, and negotiation — key to effective stakeholder relations, workshops, and policy planning. Drawing on the ‘Evidence’ tranche of the SHARED framework, the training empowers participants to leverage diverse evidence sources, including the K4GGWA Platform landscape analytics dashboards for decision-making. Meanwhile, flagship advocacy initiatives such as gender-inclusive landscape restoration and youth mobilisation also feature on the DLC, as its seminal course offering: Gender and Inclusion in FLR.

With K4GGWA’s first year focussed on scoping stakeholder needs and laying the groundwork for subsequent activities, year two is off to a busy start, with greater emphasis on increasing synergies across K4GGWA’s work streams, and scaling capacity building activities up and out.