$119m to reforest northern Africa

  1. Posted on Friday 18 June 2010 - 09:58
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    Nangayi Guyson, AfricaNews reporter in Kampala, Uganda
    Chad is holding the first summit on the "Great Green Wall" of Africa which is a proposal to plant trees along the borders of northern Africa to battle alarming desertification. The Global Environment Facility is funding the project with about US$119 million. Eleven leaders are at the summit.
    Why losing forests is worth losing wealth
    "We will make an allocation to each of your countries," GEF chief executive officer Monique Barbut told the leaders in Ndjamena. "The size of the allocation will depend on the country. The cumulative total of aid from the GEF comes to about 119 million dollars."

    "The Great Green Wall is a project conceived of by Africans for Africans and for future generations," said host President Idriss Deby Itno.

    "It's an African contribution to the battle against global warming," Deby added.

    Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade added: “The desert is in a cancerous state. We must fight it. This is why we have decided on this Titanesque struggle."

    The Great Green Wall is aimed at tackling "the degradation of the soil and poverty in the Sahel-Saharan region," Chad's Minister of the Environment Hassan Terapun told AFP on Wednesday.

    The project was in 2007 "adopted by the African Union, which made it an African response to the problem of desertification," he added.

    Sponsors of the Great Green Wall project envisage a strip of forest of about 15 kilometres (nine miles) wide on average that would link Dakar on the Atlantic coast with Djibouti on the Red Sea in the east. The wall would be more than 7,100 kilometres (4,400) miles long.

    The 11 countries comprise Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan.

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