Niger Basin countries announce $274m climate fund

Nine-member countries of the Niger Basin Authority (NBA) have pledged $274 million to support sustainable development and climate change adaptation projects.

The funding will go towards implementing the Programme for the Integrated Development and Adaptation to Climate Change (PIDACC) in the region.

The member states of the NBA are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Nigeria and they announced the pledge at the end of the Expert Meeting of the Extraordinary Session of the Council of Ministers in Abuja.

Stakeholders have called for ambitious projects and initiatives to be launched to protect the region’s population of over 130 million.

Ms Toupta Boguena, Executive Secretary of the NBA, called on nations in the region to work towards conservation and sustainable use of natural resources.

Ms Boguena said the degradation to ecosystems in the region had reached a severe level and the potential consequences for the population are alarming.

She said that climate change impacts have caused increasingly frequent droughts and flooding, which has resulted in the drastic reduction of vegetation cover.

Boguena said the challenges of climate change and rapidly growing populations are of major concern for the NBA.

“It is in this light that it is imperative to scale up our strategies and policies in order to ensure better livelihoods for our populations,” Boguena said.

The NBA chief said that about 59 per cent of PIDACC’s financing has been pledged by financing partners including the African Development Bank, Global Water Partnership, European Union and the World Bank.

Minister of Water Resources and Chairman of the NBA Council of Ministers, Mr. Suleiman Adamu, said the PIDACC programme is vital for improving the lives of the basin population.

Adamu said that Nigeria, a founding member of the NBA, had actively promoted sustainable management of natural resources in the region.