Africa’s Great Green Wall

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can Africa’s Great Green Wall beat back the Sahara desert and reverse the degrading landscape? The ambitious 9 miles wide and 5000 miles long line of vegetation will stretch all the way from Dakar in the west to Djibouti in the east.

Thomas Fessy is in Senegal where the wall has already begun to evolve into a series of forests and garden communities. He meets the planners, planters, ecologists and local villagers to hear how its early progress is reversing years of poor land use, turning nomads back to farmers, empowering women and creating healthy ecosystems for rain fed agriculture.

But can it meet its ambition to stabilize an unstable region, reverse the growing trend of migration, fight the effects of climate change and ensure this big African dream doesn’t die in the sand?

Picture: The Great Green Wall, credit: BBC

Producer Adrian Washbourne

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot to an incredibly ambitious ecological
0:46.3	project.
0:50.3	It's a homage to the Great Green Wall, a line of vegetation that's planned to stretch across the
0:56.2	arid Sahel region, from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east.
1:02.1	These women sing that they don't need to ask anyone for anything
1:06.0	now that they have the Great Green War. It will lead you, they sing. You won't be afraid of anything.
1:12.1	You'll be full of courage.
1:14.0	To me it means wealth.
1:20.0	It's transformed our daily lives.
1:24.0	Can the Great Green Wall really make a difference in this,
1:28.0	one of the poorest parts of the world?
1:31.0	I'm Tomah Fessie and in this edition of Discovery I'm journeying to key points of the
1:36.3	Great Green Wall to meet the planters, the planners, the ecologists and local
1:42.3	communities who are benefiting from this bold initiative.
1:46.0	You can see the difference between this place and the outside a young tree is growing helping us to have a better environment.
	...

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