Overview

While Africa is naturally rich in resources, up to 65 percent of productive land in Africa is degraded, while desertification affects 45 percent of Africa’s land area. Degraded forest landscapes intensify the effects of climate change and severely threaten the ecological functions vital to building prosperous and resilient economies. Rural smallholder farmers and households suffer the most as their activities depend on healthy soils, tree cover and clean water.

What the programme will do and how it will work

The programme will help accelerate restoration and value-added innovation by providing smallholder forest and farm producer organizations with direct financial and technical assistance. It will help create restoration-based businesses and mobilize investment to further encourage restoration. 

It targets the restoration of 7 000 hectares (ha) and improved management of over 20 000 ha in six participating countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Togo and the United Republic of Tanzania.  

The programme will build on several years of work by the FAO-led Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) and Forest and Landscape Restoration Mechanism (FLRM) with smallholder farmers and forest producers to link forestry and agriculture, restore degraded landscapes and increase rural livelihoods.  It will be implemented on the ground by national partners with technical support provided by FAO teams.

With the support of EUR 40 million funding from the German government (BMZ), the AFR100 Programme aims to mobilize USD 100 million to expand the programme rapidly across Africa.

The programme is a multi-partner effort led by FAO, in collaboration with the AFR100 Secretariat, which is hosted by the African Union Development Agency - New Partnership for Development (AUDA-NEPAD), the World Resources Institute (WRI), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, and the governments of the six participating countries.

The programme supports the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) which is a partnership between 34 African countries committed to restoring at least 100 million hectares of degraded land by 2030. To date, the participating countries have committed a total of 129.5 million ha for restoration.