WB stakes $5bn for 11 African countries
THEWorld Bank has indicated plans to invest over US$5 billion over the next five years to help restore degraded landscapes, improve agriculture productivity and promote livelihoods across 11 African countries.
World Bank Group president, David Malpass, announced the investment at the One Planet Summit, a high-level meeting co-hosted with France and the United Nations that was focused on addressing climate change and biodiversity loss.
The more than US$5 billion in financing will support agriculture, biodiversity, community development, food security, landscape restoration, job creation, resilient infrastructure, rural mobility, and access to renewable energy across 11 countries.
These are countries on the Sahel, Lake Chad and Horn of Africa
“This investment, which comes at a crucial time, will help improve livelihoods as countries recover from Covid-19 while also dealing with the impact of both biodiversity loss and climate change on their people and economies,” Mr Malpass said.
He said many of these efforts were in line with the Great Green Wall initiative which built on World Bank landscape investments in these countries over the past eight years that reached more than 19 million people and placed 1.6 million hectares under sustainable land management.
“Restoring natural ecosystems in the drylands of Africa benefits both people and the planet,” said Moussa Faki Mahamat, Chairperson of the African Union Commission.
Working with many partners, PROGREEN, a World Bank global fund dedicated to boosting countries’ efforts to address landscape
degradation, will also invest US$14.5 million in five Sahelian countries – Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania.
The World Bank Group is the biggest multilateral funder of climate investments in developing countries.
In December 2020, the World Bank Group announced an ambitious new target for 35 percent of its financing to have climate co-benefits, on average, over the next five years.