Now that’s a wall I can get behind.
This article is from 2024. I looked for updates and found the Wikipedia page.
It contains some contradictory statistics but this is the most recent: "In September 2020 it was reported that the Great Green Wall had only covered 4% of the planned area".
Nah, that happens everywhere (at least where governments change every few years).
This problem is common everywhere, but it's extreme in most ECOWAS countries.
“The aim of the GGW was originally to create a long vegetation barrier between the 100 and 400 mm isohyets, including ramps, and over a length of at least 7000 km along the Sahel, being roughly 15 km wide. In recent years this vision has evolved into an integrated ecosystem management approach, striving for a mosaic of different land use and production systems, including sustainable dryland management and restoration, the regeneration of natural vegetation as well as water retention and conservation measures”
I think that makes it hard to report % completed. Also, 4% is a lot of land (that same PDF says they currently target about 1½ million km² of land. That’s a lot more than that 7,000 by 15 km band originally envisioned (For comparison, the USA and Canada each are about 10 million km², so that would be about 7½% of North America), in the poorest part of the world.
As https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-05-02/africas-great-green-w... says “it will take at least a generation to make it a reality”