The Great Green Wall (GGW) Initiative aims at combatting land degradation while achieving socio-economic development across the Sahel through a mosaic of sustainable land management (SLM) and restoration practices. As the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is the main funding mechanism for land degradation neutrality related projects, GEF analyzed its previous SLM projects in four pilot countries in an effort to assess their capacity to foster scaling of interventions and fast track progress towards the GGW objectives.