Lomé hosted the launch of the planning meeting for the Great Green Wall’s GEF 8 regional project

Lomé, 23 April 2026 – The Togolese capital hosted the official launch of the planning and coordination meeting for the Great Green Wall’s GEF 8 regional project, marking a decisive step in the operational structuring of this pan-African initiative. Organised by the Pan-African Agency of the Great Green Wall, in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme and the West African Development Bank, this strategic meeting brought together the national agencies of nine beneficiary countries as well as the main technical and financial partners (UNEP and BOAD).

Stemming from a process launched in 2024 and made concrete by the approval of the Global Environment Facility between November 2025 and February 2026 for an overall investment of approximately 78 million dollars, the GEF 8 programme aims to strengthen the impact of the Great Green Wall’s actions through an integrated and coordinated approach at the regional scale. Faced with accelerating land degradation and growing climate and security challenges, the participants underlined the need for collective, coherent and ambitious action capable of sustainably transforming the Sahelian territories.
At the opening ceremony, the various statements underlined the urgency of acting in the face of land degradation, the effects of climate change and the security challenges in the Sahel, while putting forward a collective vision founded on solidarity and connectivity between countries. The representative of UNEP, Juan Carlos Vasquez, recalled that this initiative goes beyond the environmental framework to become a structuring African response, bearing sovereignty and economic opportunities, in particular through the creation of green jobs and the empowerment of women. With the support of the Global Environment Facility, the project aims to restore hundreds of thousands of hectares, generate sustainable jobs and reach millions of beneficiaries by 2031. Proceeding to the official opening, the representative of the Executive Secretary of the PAGGW, Dr Sakhoudia Thiam, commended the ongoing commitment of the partners and called for greater synergy between the member States in order to achieve the ambitious objectives of the Great Green Wall.

Beyond its institutional character, this Lomé meeting marks the operational start-up of a regional mechanism designed to support national projects in terms of coordination, capacity-building, harmonisation of technical approaches and the development of sustainable value chains. The work is expected to lead to several structuring results, in particular the clear definition of the regional project’s areas of support, the validation of an implementation model adapted to the needs of the countries (advice, training, technical workshops), as well as the development of a consolidated regional work plan, aligned with national priorities. The discussions will also address key cross-cutting dimensions such as gender, communication and knowledge capitalisation, with the ambition of strengthening the impact and visibility of the initiative.

Ultimately, this programme is expected to generate significant environmental and socio-economic benefits, with ambitious objectives including the restoration of hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, the improvement of sustainable landscape management, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the improvement of the living conditions of more than 3 million beneficiaries, the majority of whom are women. By laying the foundations for strengthened regional coordination, the Lomé meeting thus paves the way for a new phase of implementation that is more integrated, more effective and oriented towards concrete results for the populations and ecosystems of the Sahel.