These rivers flow from a common water tower, one of nature’s treasures—the forested highlands of the Fouta Djallon. These are also home to an additional three transboundary rivers, which are shorter in length but just as vital to the countries that rely on their waters. In times of climate change, Fouta Djallon, home to dozens of sources for each river, is dying a slow and all but invisible death amid the world’s general indifference. 

Highlands with Local, Regional, and Global Significance

How could we not support local populations who rely on the Highlands’ resources for food, firewood, grazing land for their livestock? Entangled with chronic misdevelopment, Fouta Djallon’s communities have been left to be frontline actors of the Highlands degradation while being primarily hard hit by its effects.

How could we not take up this regional challenge affecting more than 300 million West Africans whose livelihoods depend upon these rivers which provide electricity, irrigation, transport, and drinking water ? 

How could we ignore this threat to global security, as the Fouta Djallon are truly the environmental and strategic depths of the Sahel, the epicentre from which a regained ecosystemically sustainable peace can one day be projected again onto the whole Sahel ? 

These are the three scales to be articulated.

The UN Water Conference held in New York from 22 to 24 March provided a unique opportunity to raise the alarm and bring this issue to the attention of the international community. Instead of merely making a diagnosis, we (the authors) put forward for consideration a three-pronged approach for the global community. 

A Three-Pronged Approach for Saving the Rivers, Highlands

We (the global community) should support local populations wanting to revisit aspects of their traditional lifestyles in sustainable ways. This means helping local populations adopt new energy sources, better grazing methods, and access more appropriate and sustainable waterpoints. This will require a revitalized organization of socio-economic life of local communities to safeguard both the health of the highlands and their long-term access to those resources. 

We should support technological dissemination and data collection in the Highlands to increase environmental and ecosystem knowledge and monitoring. Innovative water catchment systems, observation satellites, new forms of irrigation, or introduction of Sahelian low-carbon agroecological practices are key to meet the pressing need for consolidated environmental knowledge of the region and the development of knowledge-sharing platforms. These efforts must be taken up not by foreign startups but by young African entrepreneurs within regional incubators.

Finally, scaling up these new dynamics cannot be achieved without finance. But the one required is sustainable finance (be it green, blue, or a way to trade dept against environmental results). Such a sustainable finance however relies on this very geo-located data of the hundreds of sources and rich ecosystems of the Fouta Djallon for impact investors to efficiently direct their philanthropy.

To achieve this three-pronged action plan, local authorities, regional environmental entrepreneurs, data, and international sustainable finance and philanthropy are required. This is the new transnational coalition the hundreds of headsprings of these mighty but fragile rivers are crying for, with local communities at the very heart of this system, to take up this transition and with concerted actions between the countries affected and West African river basin organizations. These are already high-performing -one got nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, two of them are spear-heading innovative blue finance initiatives – and these are good news from the Sahel that deserve support to be rolled out.

It is this safeguarding plan, nay rescue plan, which was exchanged upon for the first time at the headquarters of the UN on 24 March and which now requires the attention of decision makers and financiers everywhere to be carried out, 

In “a village one can only leave, the rain does not fall anymore; it is suspended. The river is drying up,” Mozambican writer Mia Couto wrote in his powerful tale A Chuva Pasmada, literally meaning “the stunned rain.” Let us neither remain suspended nor stunned; the future of these three great African rivers is at stake.”