Cabo Verde's Post-Independence National Afforestation Programme — From 3,000 to Over 90,000 Hectares

At independence in 1975, semi-arid Cabo Verde had almost no natural forest and only about 3,000 hectares of afforested land, and it faced worsening desertification after successive drought years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The new government made reforestation and water and soil conservation a national priority, financing decades of tree-planting and terracing labour partly by internally commercializing international food aid — a food-for-work model that channelled donor resources into rural conservation employment from 1975 through the late 1990s, according to the FAO Science, Technology and Innovation Portal.
By 2011, afforested land had grown roughly thirtyfold to over 90,000 hectares with an estimated 50 million trees planted, concentrated on the islands of Santiago and Santo Antão; independent FAOSTAT/World Bank data corroborate the trend, recording national forest area rising from 3.82% of land area in 1990 to 11.34% by 2020 — today more than 20% of the country is classed as afforested.
Much of the planted estate relies on fast-growing exotic species such as Prosopis juliflora and Eucalyptus camaldulensis rather than native highland forest, and a 2021–2025 FAO/EU-funded follow-on project (REFLOR-CV) was launched specifically because large parts of the original planted forest remain vulnerable to climate stress and weak management — the programme's scale is well evidenced, its long-term ecological resilience less so.

Read the full analysis: https://sti-portal.fao.org/innovations/afforestation