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The cash will go towards restoring damaged environments and improving livelihoods as countries recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. The money will finance interventions in agriculture, water, community development, food security, resilient infrastructure, landscape restoration and renewable energy, said World Bank Group President David Malpass. (Fake images)
Reuters
The World Bank will invest $ 5 billion in 11 African countries
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The World Bank said it would invest more than $ 5 billion over the next five years to help restore degraded landscapes, improve agricultural productivity and promote livelihoods in 11 African countries as they recover from the pandemic of COVID-19.
World Bank Group President David Malpass said the investment would help improve livelihoods as those countries recover from the outbreak and address the impact of biodiversity loss and climate change through 2025.
Malpass announced the aid at the One Planet Summit, a high-level meeting organized jointly with France and the United Nations that focuses on addressing climate change and biodiversity loss.
The money will fund interventions in agriculture, water, community development, food security, resilient infrastructure, landscape restoration and renewable energy, Malpass said.
The funds will benefit countries in the Sahel region, Lake Chad and the Horn of Africa, the Bank said in a statement. The countries are Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan.
Malpass said the World Bank’s PROGREEN global fund dedicated to boosting countries’ efforts to address landscape degradation would add $ 14.5 million for projects in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.
He said that the Sahel region, in particular, was one of the most vulnerable to desertification and land degradation, and temperature increases were projected to be 1.5 times faster than the global average. Eighty percent of agricultural land in the region was degraded and about 30 million people were food insecure, he said.
Malpass said that investing in the restoration of Sahel landscapes was crucial to mitigating these trends. COVID-19 was exacerbating poverty levels, and extreme poverty rates in the Sahel are expected to rise for the first time in decades, by 1.5 percentage points on average in 2020.
This translated into 1.23 million more people who were extremely poor in the Sahel region.
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