A consortium of restoration partners was recently established to prepare a new programme under the AFR100 initiative that aims to support FLR in several African countries. The programme entitled: “Large Scale Forest Landscape Restoration in Africa,” will be funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, BMU, through the International Climate Initiative (IKI). It will provide more than USD 22 million to support Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi and Rwanda in their efforts to restore more than 100 000 hectares of degraded land that they have pledged under AFR100 and the Bonn Challenge. The programme will be prepared and implemented under the responsibility of several institutions, including FAO, GIZ, IUCN, NEPAD, World Resources Institute, World Bank and WWF.

The consortium partners met in February at NEPAD headquarters in Midrand, South Africa, to take stock of the results of the scoping missions already carried out in three of the participating countries and to prepare for the last mission in Malawi. The meeting also served to define the results framework of the  programme and clarify roles and responsibilities among the consortium partners and modalities of working together.

This ambitious new programme will be an important means of support to each country involved, not only in restoring targeted degraded landscapes, but also in helping to establish or reinforce the enabling conditions that will be needed to take restoration to scale. The approach will, therefore, set the stage for additional programmes and projects that can benefit from the foundational support this project will provide in terms of improved policies, legal frameworks, institutional arrangements and other conditions that are fundamental for large-scale restoration to succeed.

In addition, this programme is attempting something quite new in terms of how development partners and FLR supporting institutions provide their assistance to countries. This new consortium will work as a team within each country to deliver needed support by combining forces and ensuring that the comparative advantage of each institution is fully contributing to the support provided at country level. The idea is to develop new modalities of collaboration that will demonstrate the added value of working together and provide the basis for future collaboration in FLR in Africa and elsewhere.

FAO will be leading implementation of the programme in Malawi, which has pledged to restore 4.5 million ha and where restoration efforts under this project are expected to have an impact on at least 25 000 ha in Ntcheu District, where poverty and food insecurity are high and forest resources and agricultural productivity are under serious threat. IUCN and WRI will be supporting scaling up, monitoring and resource mobilization efforts. A scoping mission involving several consortium partners was carried out in late February in Malawi to discuss the project concept with different stakeholder groups from government, civil society, private sector and local institutions and communities. A field visit was carried out to the targeted intervention site to assess the extent of degradation and begin to discuss the issue of landscape restoration with local stakeholders. The mission resulted in a letter of intent signed by the Government of Malawi, FAO and GIZ, paving the way for the development of a full project proposal.

Malawi has also recently been accepted to join the new GEF7 Impact Programme on Sustainable Forest Management in Dryland Landscapes, working with FAO as the GEF Agency to set up a new restoration project in the Miombo woodlands. These two projects provide a great opportunity to develop complementary approaches that will ensure maximum value of the funds invested and the possibility to address any gaps that a single stand-alone project might not be able to cover. Project preparation will proceed along a very similar time frame and both new projects are expected to be operational by mid-2020.

For more information contact: [email protected] or click here.

Douglas McGuire (FAO)