Every night Moussa Kamara (seen below) 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.
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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.
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Kamara the baker believes the gardens could offer a further benefit - discouraging sub-Saharan Africans from embarking on long, perilous journeys as illegal migrants in search of better lives in Europe and America.
"The day people realise the full potential of the Great Green Wall, they will stop these dangerous migration routes where you can lose your life at sea," he said. "It's better to stay, work the soil, cultivate and see what you can earn."
Photo editing Marika Kochiashvili; Video production Christophe Van Der Perre, Francesca Lynagh and Lucy Ha; Text editing Edward McAllister and Gareth Jones, Layout Julia Dalrymple