Committed to environmental restoration, the World Resources Institute (WRI) has just raised $100 million (59.8 billion CFA francs) from the Audacious Project, a collaborative funding initiative supported by leading philanthropic organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Emerson Collective charity and the Skoll Foundation.
“The funds will be used to encourage tree planting in the Lake Kivu and Rusizi River Basin, which straddles the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi and Rwanda, as well as in Ghana’s cocoa belt and Kenya’s Great Rift Valley,” the WRI said in a statement released on 17 April 2023. Running from 2024 to 2028, this reforestation project will contribute to the objectives of AFR100 (African Forest Landscape Restoration), an initiative launched by the African Union (AU) to restore 100 million hectares (or 1 million km²) of degraded and deforested landscapes by 2030.
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AFR100 is led by the African Union’s (AU) New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) agency, in partnership with 27 participating countries. The initiative, launched in 2015, requires a total of $500 million in funding to be realised. This funding has been slow to materialise, despite commitments from states.
In September 2018, two countries committed to restoring a combined 19.6 million hectares of land in order to achieve the 100 million hectare target. These are Burkina Faso (5 million hectares) and the Republic of Sudan (14.6 million hectares). These commitments follow those of Togo (1.4 million hectares) and Tanzania (5.2 million hectares).
Boris Ngounou