Main page content

Benefits of land restoration in Africa - Interview with Mamadou Diakhité

Diakhité is Team Leader of the Sustainable Land and Water Management Programme of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).

This interview has been conducted at the Workshop "Climate, Development, Growth" on November 26 2015.

"This initiative actually has two parts. It is called the African Resilience Landscape Initiative and another one is Africa 100 Restoration Initiative. The two initiatives have a political policy and technical parts, and they are led by different partnering institutions, the NEPAD agency, the BMZ (German ministry) and the WRI. So, it’s a combination of different institutions with different mandate. The main objective of this initiative is to reach, by 2030, one hundred millions of hectares of land/forest restored in Africa. Obviously, we can see the linkage with the climate change policy and action in Africa, because this initiative will have broad adaptation and mitigation benefits.

It is just starting now and it is linked to another initiative called the Bonn Challenge whereby the German government provides support to this partnership so…and on the other side the African countries who are participating in this initiative will take commitments to get X number of hectares of land restored with all the economic, social and environmental benefits that are attached to this initiative.

The social benefit is to recreate the livelihoods of degraded land so to get back communities/people to have their ecosystem restored and provide economic value and income to agroforestry and conservation and agriculture and so on and so forth."