From acacia to land restoration: How Nexira’s Acacia Project is building resilience in the Sahel

Ahead of Desertification and Drought Day (DDD) on 17 June, and during this important year for the three Rio Convention COPs, attention is increasingly focused on the links between healthy land, resilient livelihoods and long-term stability. 

Globally, up to 40 per cent of the Earth's land is degraded, affecting nearly half of humanity and threatening food security, biodiversity and economic development.

These challenges are particularly acute in the Sahel, where communities face the combined pressures of climate change, land degradation and economic vulnerability. Here, sustainable value chains are demonstrating how private sector engagement can contribute to both environmental restoration and rural development.

Few examples illustrate this connection more clearly than the acacia gum sector, which links millions of rural producers to global markets while supporting the restoration of dryland ecosystems. At the center of this effort is Nexira, a global leader in natural ingredients and a member of the UNCCD Business4Land (B4L) Champions’ Council, working alongside SOS SAHEL to strengthen the resilience of communities and landscapes across the Sahel.

Why acacia gum matters

Gum acacia, or gum arabic, a natural ingredient harvested from acacia senegal and acacia seyal trees, is used worldwide in food, beverage, nutrition and cosmetic products. Yet beyond its functional  applications, the gum acacia value chain plays a critical role in some of the world's most fragile dryland regions.

The vast “gum belt” stretching across a dozen countries in the Sahel supports millions of people whose livelihoods depend on acacia-based agroforestry systems. In many dryland areas, these trees provide one of the few reliable sources of income while helping communities adapt to increasingly frequent droughts and climate shocks. Beyond their economic value, they help stabilize soils, improve fertility through nitrogen fixation, reduce erosion and strengthen the resilience of dryland ecosystems to drought. As a result, gum acacia production creates a direct link between economic opportunity and sustainable land management

A long-term partnership for people and landscapes

For more than 15 years, Nexira and the NGO SOS SAHEL have worked together through the Acacia Project, an ambitious initiative designed to restore degraded landscapes while strengthening rural livelihoods in Chad. The program combines agroforestry, ecosystem restoration, producer training and community development to create long-term benefits for both people and nature.

The first phases of the programme delivered significant results, including the restoration of degraded lands, large-scale tree planting, biodiversity enhancement and support for local communities. The third phase, which is currently in process (2022–2030), aims to scale these efforts further, reaching 200 villages and 50,000 producers while supporting the sustainable management of 300,000 hectares of forest landscapes. The program is also expected to generate substantial carbon sequestration benefits while strengthening the gum acacia value chain and expanding economic opportunities for rural communities.

A key feature of the program is its focus on social inclusion. Efforts to strengthen women's participation in producer organizations and leadership structures are helping ensure that the benefits of ecosystem restoration and value chain development are shared more broadly across communities.

The broader framework: the Great Green Wall and its Accelerator

The Acacia Project does not exist in isolation. It is part of a far larger continental ambition. The Great Green Wall initiative, launched by the African Union, aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tons of carbon and create 10 million green jobs by 2030 in the Sahel.

To accelerate progress toward these targets, the Great Green Wall Accelerator was launched during the One Planet Summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron in January 2021, securing USD 19 billion in funding commitments. Hosted by the UNCCD Global Mechanism, the Accelerator was created to strengthen the monitoring of the Initiative's funding and results, and has played a pivotal role in enhancing governance, fundraising efforts, and stakeholder engagement across the Initiative.

Among its five pillars, the Accelerator specifically targets investment in small and medium-sized farms and the strengthening of value chains and local markets, the exact terrain where the Acacia Project operates. While governments provide the policy framework, achieving the Great Green Wall's ambitions will depend heavily on private sector investment capable of transforming restoration into viable economic opportunities for local communities.  Nexira's long-term commitment in Chad is precisely the kind of private sector engagement the Accelerator was designed to catalyse and scale.

Value chains as the engine of restoration: what the evidence shows

The strategic case for nature-based value chains in the Sahel was crystallised in a landmark 2022 report by the World Economic Forum's 1t.org initiative. The Untapped Potential of Great Green Wall Value Chains: An Action Agenda to Scale Restoration in the Sahel, based on interviews with more than 100 stakeholders, identified nine tree crop value chains with the greatest environmental, social and market potential across the region: among them African baobab, shea, moringa and gum acacia, the very crop at the heart of Nexira's Acacia Project.

The report's findings paint a striking picture of untapped opportunity. Beyond the environmental benefits of restoration, the Sahel's nature-based value chains represent a significant economic opportunity. Despite a global personal care market worth an estimated $240 billion per year, the Sahel captures only around $5 billion in value across all its products. In the $150 billion superfoods market, GGW products show stronger competitiveness, though production costs remain high and consumer awareness limited. The diagnosis is clear: the raw material, the ecological potential and the communities are there, but the value chains connecting them to global markets remain underdeveloped and underfinanced.

Critically, the nine prioritised crops, including gum acacia, are all naturally adapted to Sahelian conditions, require no fertilisation or irrigation, and already deliver a range of co-benefits: community resilience, food security, income opportunities for women, soil quality improvement, biodiversity support and carbon sequestration. The report also flagged that despite significant carbon sequestration potential, almost no natural resource carbon projects were being implemented in the Sahel at the time of writing, pointing to a major financing opportunity still waiting to be unlocked.

The report's core recommendation was that multistakeholder partnerships, bringing together public actors, private companies, civil society and local entrepreneurs, are the essential mechanism for scaling these value chains and turning their environmental and economic potential into reality on the ground.

Nexira's Acacia Project is precisely this kind of partnership in action. By combining responsible sourcing with long-term landscape investment and producer support in Chad, it demonstrates that closing the gap between the Sahel's natural wealth and global markets is both achievable and transformative, for supply chains, for communities and for the land itself.

Business leadership for land restoration

Nexira's work illustrates the growing recognition that land restoration is not only an environmental imperative but also a business priority. Through responsible sourcing, investment in producer communities and long-term landscape restoration, companies can help build more resilient supply chains while contributing to sustainable development.

This approach aligns closely with the objectives of Business4Land (B4L), UNCCD's flagship private sector initiative, which seeks to mobilize companies to address land degradation, strengthen drought resilience and contribute to the global goal of restoring 1.5 billion hectares of land by 2030. Achieving this target will require unprecedented collaboration between governments, businesses, financial institutions and local communities.

As one of the founding members of the B4L Champions’ Council, Nexira is helping demonstrate how private sector leadership can translate ambitious land commitments into concrete action on the ground. 

Celebrating Desertification and Drought Day in Paris

To mark Desertification and Drought Day 2026, Nexira and SOS SAHEL are joining a special public event on 17 June at the Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil, Paris' botanical garden. The event will bring together experts, organizations and the public to explore the resources, knowledge and restoration solutions emerging from the Sahel, while highlighting the importance of combating desertification and strengthening resilience in drylands.

The event offers an opportunity to showcase how sustainable value chains, community-led restoration and long-term partnerships can contribute to both environmental recovery and economic opportunity.

Investing in land, investing in resilience

The challenges facing the Sahel are complex and interconnected. Land degradation undermines livelihoods, increases vulnerability to climate shocks and can contribute to instability. At the same time, restoring productive landscapes creates opportunities for income generation, food security and community resilience.

The experience of the Acacia Program demonstrates that when businesses, local communities and civil society organizations work together, nature-based value chains can become powerful drivers of sustainable development.

In the Sahel, where the health of the land and the wellbeing of communities are deeply interconnected, initiatives such as the Acacia Project demonstrate that restoration can be more than an environmental objective. It can create jobs, strengthen resilience, support local economies and help turn global restoration commitments into tangible results on the ground.