BOKI DIAWE, Senegal, July 28 (Reuters) - 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.

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.

"When you grow one tree, over 20 years people and animals will benefit from it," said Kamara, whose commitment and hard work have earned him the role of garden caretaker.

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 8,000-km line of trees from Senegal to Djibouti.

The wider initiative has only managed to plant 4% of the pledged 100 million hectares of trees, and completing it by 2030, as planned, could cost up to $43 billion, according to United Nations estimates.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY

By contrast, the 'Tolou Keur' gardens have flourished in the seven months since the project began and now number around 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. READ further from the source above