Case Study - Tracking land restoration progress across the Sahel for the Great Green Wall

Client

The UNCCD Global Mechanism supports countries in mobilizing finance to combat desertification and land degradation. It coordinates the Great Green Wall Initiative, Africa's flagship program to restore degraded landscapes across the Sahel.

Opportunity

The Great Green Wall spans multiple countries, funders, and implementing partners. Several projects were running in parallel, each tracking its own indicators, reporting on different timelines, and feeding data into separate systems. The initiative's digital monitoring platform needed updating to better serve national agencies, and there was no shared approach to turning project outputs into knowledge that could support coordination and funding decisions across the region.

Approach

We designed a unified monitoring framework covering ecological and social restoration indicators, aligned with the initiative's overarching results framework while meeting the reporting requirements of multiple funders. We built an indicator tracking tool that brings country-level and project-level data together in one place. The requirements gathering process followed a similar approach to the M&E system requirements work we did for Habitat for Humanity, and the challenge of aligning stakeholders across country offices mirrors what we tackled in the user discovery for project management engagement with LWF World Service.

We then ran consultations with national agencies and regional partners to understand what was working in the monitoring platform and where it fell short. That produced an optimization report with concrete recommendations for making the platform more useful at country level.

In parallel, we developed a knowledge management strategy that connects monitoring outputs to resource mobilization. The goal: project findings flow to the stakeholders and funders who need them, rather than sitting in reports.

Finally, we built training infrastructure. We developed online tutorials in English and French and organized two workshops where stakeholders shared practices in monitoring, reporting, and knowledge sharing.

Outcomes

The engagement delivered:

• A monitoring and knowledge management strategy linked to resource mobilization
• An indicator tracking tool connecting country and project data to the initiative's monitoring platform
• A platform optimization report based on consultations with regional partners
• Online tutorials in English and French
• Four quarterly progress reports
• Two monitoring and knowledge management workshops with documentation

The initiative now has a coherent monitoring approach across its projects and a pipeline from land restoration data through to the knowledge products that inform funding and coordination across the Sahel.

Technologies used

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At Hikaya, we help NGOs and nonprofits worldwide design monitoring frameworks that connect public datasets and program data to the reporting platforms funders and national agencies depend on.

If your initiative spans multiple projects and countries but monitoring feels fragmented, a clear framework that aligns indicators, platforms, and stakeholder needs is the right starting point. Start a conversation with us, or explore how we work from discovery through delivery.