Charles Eisenstein Reports:
“The Great Green Wall is a reforestation, land healing, peace, water restoration, and anti-poverty project spanning the entire African continent, from Senegal in the west to Eritrea nearly 5000 miles to the east. Originally conceived as a way to contain the growth of the Sahara Desert, it is not simply a wall of trees but a complex mosaic of indigenous land use techniques for restoring life and livelihoods across the Sahel…
“The causes of African poverty are a tangle of complexity. Fundamentally, Africa is a rich continent in human and natural terms. What makes it poor is primarily the stripping of those resources by external powers. It started with the slave trade, which was succeeded by the resource extraction of the colonial era. Following the independence movements of the 1960s, explicit colonialism gave way to debt servitude, as African nations sell their raw materials and labor to raise hard currency to make payments on development loans. To enforce the necessary sacrifices, external powers bribe local elites to comply with their development policies, regime-change them if they won’t, or, more insidiously, educate them abroad in the ideology of development. That educational regime, transplanted back to Africa, defines Africa as backwards and defines progress in terms of emulating the West. Not only does that cement the debt regime in place, but it also deals a devastating blow to local cultural vitality…”