Underwritten by Tristan James Jr.
Every night, Moussa Kamara works at his bakery preparing hundreds of loaves. But at sunrise, instead of going home to sleep, he now starts a second back-breaking job – hoeing the earth and tending newly sown seeds in a specially designed circular garden.
Kamara, 47, believes the garden will prove even more important than the bakery in the future for feeding his extended family, including 25 children, and other residents of Boki Dawe, a Senegalese town near the border with Mauritania.
A newly built Tolou Keur garden in Boki Diawe, within the Great Green Wall area, in Matam region, Senegal.
[Zohra Bensemra/Reuters]
He is part of a project that aims to create hundreds of such gardens – known as “Tolou Keur” in Senegal’s Wolof language – that organisers hope will boost food security, reduce regional desertification and engage thousands of community workers.
“This project is incredibly important,” said Kamara, finally at home after a night spent at the bakery followed by 10 hours of cultivating edible and medicinal plants in the garden.
The project marks a new, more local approach to what is known as the Green Wall initiative, launched in 2007, that aims to slow desertification across Africa’s Sahel region, the arid belt south of the Sahara Desert, by planting an 8,000km (4,970 miles) line of trees from Senegal to Djibouti.
The wider initiative has only managed to plant 4 percent of the pledged 100 million hectares (247 million acres) of trees, and completing it by 2030, as planned, could cost up to $43bn, according to United Nations estimates.
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Self Sufficiency
By contrast, the Tolou Keur gardens have flourished in the seven months since the project began and now number about two dozen, said Senegal’s reforestation agency.
Three months after a garden is completed, its agents begin a series of monthly visits over two years to assess progress.
Project manager Karine Fakhoury said it was important that local people felt fully engaged: “This is not an external project, where somebody comes from outside and tells people what to do. It is something entirely indigenous.”
The gardens are partly a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Senegal shut its borders early last year to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus, cutting imports and exposing rural communities’ dependence on foreign food and medicines.
“The day people realise the full potential of the Great Green Wall, they will stop these dangerous migration routes where you can lose your life at sea,” he said. “It’s better to stay, work the soil, cultivate and see what you can earn.”
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