Fatima Tirap, adviser to the president of Chad, came to Israel for the first time last March as part of an 11-country African delegation learning about agricultural technologies and especially precision irrigation. 

“Israel is very good in this sector and we are working with international partners to see how they can raise money and implement it in our region,” Tirap tells ISRAEL21c. 

“Chad is huge, but we have zero technology. Israeli agritech will completely change the game and the economy.” 

Tirap’s experience was made possible by Beersheva-based DeserTech Climate Technologies Community, a new Israeli initiative supporting the Great Green Wall. 

The GGW is an African-led movement to grow an 8,000-kilometer wall of vegetation to mitigate climate change, drought, famine, unemployment, food insecurity, conflict and migration across Africa’s Sahel region between the Sahara Desert and the Sudanese savanna.

DeserTech was launched in the Senegalese pavilion at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt last November by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Merage Foundation Israel, the Israel Innovation Institute and the Ministry of Environmental Protection as part of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

DeserTech positions the Negev as an international center for adapting technologies and connecting entrepreneurs, investors, industry, researchers and policymakers in the fight against severe desertification afflicting former fertile African drylands. 

“We had an incredible time seeing how agriculture is done in the Negev,” Tirap says. “For a young Sahelian Chadian woman, it was an eye-opener.” 

Chad, she notes, recently opened an embassy in Tel Aviv.

“We are proud of our good relationship with Israel. I kept telling the team that the project [in agritech] will the first baby of the marriage of Israel and Chad.”