Inside the UN’s Massive Lake Project in Africa

We gave been tracking this agricultural revolution now for over twenty years..  Zoa pits, half moon ponds and now governments have woken up and understood that it is possible to make kilometer long dikes along a contour to hold water which commes typcally only during a short rainy season.  not exactly beaver country yet, but this is certainly imitation.

Dikes are easily made using a bulldozer anywhere it makes sense.  what you really need are people and we have that in the Sahel along the great wall of africa.  what happens is that the diked ponds fill up.  ponce a year.  As the water slowly recedes , you plant in the wet soils opened up.  Several such cycles and you end up intensely cropping the entire pond bed evey year.  Obviously this produces a massive amount of local food.

The ponds also recharge the local aquafers fully charging werlls..  This then also allows well based irrigation to also take place fore largert wrll equipped operations.

All this is cheap and easily managed locally.  Trees andv expanding ground cover should easily allow all this to push deeply into the desert.

Recall the whole Sahara was once even a rainforest.  This will bring a lot of that back and feed billions.

Inside the UN’s Massive Lake Project in Africa


Andrew Millison



87,546 views 18 Jan 2026

In Episode 4 of the series, Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison journeys with the UN World Food Programme to the edge of the Sahara Desert in the Abeche and Mongo regions of Chad. He visits 3 projects where massive dykes have been to hold back floodwaters and soak the water into the ground to create fertile well-watered farms and recharge water tables. 

EPISODE 1: Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega Project • Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project EPISODE 2: How Refugees are Greening the Edge of the Sahara • How Refugees are Greening the Edge of the ... EPISODE 3: How Africa's Great Green Wall is Solving an Ancient Conflict • How Africa's Great Green Wall is Solving a... WFP Resilience Building:

https://www.wfp.org/resilience-building Coordinates of major sites visited (paste these into Google Earth): 1st site at Tabarka Village: 13°56'29.82"N 20°50'50.00"E 2nd site in Tandou Valley: 13°47'29.11"N 20°53'55.38"E 3rd site outside Mongo: 12° 6'18.59"N 18°40'27.13"E Thanks to Evelyn Fey of the WFP media team for camera and drone videography Special thanks to BOMBINO ( https://www.bombinomusic.com/ ) for use of music tracks. Digital Map Animation thanks to Ben Missimer of Pearl River Eco Design: https://www.pearlriverecodesign.com/ Oregon State University Online Permaculture Design Course: https://workspace.oregonstate.edu/cou... Andrew Millison’s links: https://www.andrewmillison.com/ https://permaculturedesign.oregonstat...

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