Abstract

The Great Green Wall is a cross-country initiative to improve the environment of desertification areas in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper uses the implementation of Great Green Wall project in Nigeria as a quasi-natural experiment to document the local impact of environmental restoration on children’s food security and health. Our identification strategy uses two types of variation to capture these effects. The spatial variation comes from the heterogeneous exposure of the children to these new environmental restoration programs. The temporal variation comes from sudden changes between 2013 and 2016. Taking the height-to-age standard deviation as main outcome of interest, we find a significant and robust health improvement for children living next to community-based orchards whereas proximity to shelterbelts generates mixed impacts. Further results confirm that the observed increase in height-to-age occurs through better food security, in particular with higher dietary diversity score for children living near orchards.

Co-author : Pauline Castaing

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