SaRCiSP is a long-horizon development programme spanning the Sahel and West Africa, with an initial focus on the member countries of the Great Green Wall (GGW). It is designed as a scalable implementation framework, multilateral across host countries, that advances municipality by municipality while remaining aligned with national and regional development priorities.
Municipalities (communes in Francophone West Africa) serve as the programme’s primary operating units, while national governments play an important enabling role in creating the conditions for long-term investment and implementation.
The objective for each commune is to be:
The challenge in Sahel resilience and circular-systems work is not only a lack of capital. Too often, the real gap is the absence of trusted systems through which funders can understand how their capital will be deployed and verify outcomes with confidence.
SaRCiSP closes that gap by providing the institutional and digital infrastructure needed for funders to model expected outcomes before committing capital and to verify delivery throughout implementation.
SaRCiSP is the first instance of RCiSP – Terravive Group’s pattern for delivering municipal-scale resilience and circular systems, applied region by region. Each instance is tuned to its context, but they share the same operating spine: municipalities as the primary unit, governments as enablers, multilateral scaffolding for coordination.
Other instances are emerging. South Asia (India) is in early formation. A Middle East instance is under assessment.
SaRCiSP anchors its work at the commune. National governments enable; multilateral partners coordinate at regional level; capital is structured per branch. The substantive work – implementation, people, infrastructure – happens at commune scale.
This is deliberate. Resilience and circular-systems work that targets only national-level outcomes typically loses traction at the implementation layer. Anchoring at the commune keeps decisions with the people accountable to the population those decisions affect, and keeps infrastructure sized to communities that can sustain it.
Photo credit: Terre Verte, Burkina Faso – www.eauterreverdure.org
Briefings and supporting documentation are available on request.
Each commune deploys a tuned combination of interventions, sized to context, capacity and priorities. Note that not every intervention will appear in every commune.
Digital decision infrastructure is implemented to ensure coherence, accountability and transparency in how the programme is run, and how the commune is governed. Ultimately, it protects the integrity of the programme.
Coupled with systemic standards, it gives the programme a shared spine – common decisions, common evidence, common terms – so that one commune’s work can be assessed alongside another’s, and so that infrastructure and decisions persist through leadership and electoral cycles, and across generational transitions.
The standards are developed where the friction actually shows up – in real cases, in real institutional settings – and refined through a structured decision and review process.
Each intervention is selected for its fit with the commune’s context. New interventions are added as the programme evolves and new local problems come into scope.
Urban oases add shade and form cooling zones in commune environments – cooling islands of restored landscape and biodiversity. They are not just one intervention among many. They are the centre of gravity around which most SaRCiSP work in a commune organises. They give public space its first visible improvement, anchor community engagement, host environmental education, and provide the visual evidence partners and funders can see when assessing the work.
Every SaRCiSP commune is expected to deploy a network of urban oases. The detail varies – number, scale, integration with existing public space – but the principle is consistent: where infrastructure changes lives, urban oases are where the change shows up first.
SaRCiSP looks for interventions that solve more than one problem at once – interventions where an environmental fix, an economic flow and a local livelihood arise from the same activity. Invasive aquatic plants – typha in Senegal, water hyacinth in other parts of West Africa – choke waterways and farmland. Clearing them feeds a commune biomass plant; the plant pays by the tonne for what is delivered; the plant produces biogas, fertilizer and pavers; the surrounding ecology recovers.
Three wins from one intervention: an environmental problem removed, value created from waste, and an income stream for the people doing the work. SaRCiSP seeks out this design wherever it can – in every commune where it operates.
Some arrangements operate at the programme level rather than within an individual commune – connecting branches, structuring capital, or creating partnerships beyond what any single commune could carry alone.
SaRCiSP brings constituent initiatives under common institutional scaffolding across host countries.
CSGF builds a transparent institutional record of every decision, applied across the programme with integrity and coherence. The methodical application of systemic standards ensures its continuity.
Knowledge captured across active branches is curated and redistributed, so each commune benefits from the work of others. A core SaRCiSP function.
The articles below provide contextual perspective on systemic standards and regenerative land-use practice. They illuminate conditions that matter directly to circular food systems.
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