A Mali tree project won a United Nations changemaker award

Mongabay reported on November 5, 2026, that Rokiatou Traoré has been named a changemaker at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Action Awards. She accepted in Rome on October 29. Traoré founded Herou Alliance, a social enterprise that restores tired land in rural Mali by raising seedlings, training farmers, and planting trees, then selling what the trees produce. Since 2021 the work has centered on moringa. She told Mongabay the group makes tea, powder, honey, soap, spices, and supplements from the leaves, flowers, and seeds, for markets in Mali and beyond.

At the ceremony she said the alliance has planted 150,000 moringa and baobab trees and trained more than 2,000 smallholder farmers. Moringa is native to South Asia and widely grown in Africa. It handles drought, and its leaves are eaten for vitamins and protein. Mongabay noted that there is still not enough research on how well it performs in restoration programs in the dry Sahel. The alliance has set a target of restoring 10 million hectares in Mali by 2040. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification has said land degradation affected 11.5 million hectares in the country in 2019. The 10 million hectares are a goal. The checked results are the award, the 150,000 trees, and the farmers already trained. Earlier accounts of the enterprise place its first plantations in the Koulikoro region.