October 4, 2021 By Venkat Iyer, Mary Gronkiewicz, Samuel Kabiru, Will Anderson and Amanda Gant Cover Image by: Will Anderson/WRI
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Here’s the good news: In the past decade, development banks and the private sector have made financial commitments of more than $16 billion to restore Africa’s degraded farms, forests and other ecosystems through the AFR100 and the Great Green Wall Initiatives. It’s no wonder funders are interested — every $1 invested in land restoration can create $7-30 in economic benefits while protecting biodiversity and fighting climate change.

Here’s the bad news: We don’t know exactly how much money has landed in the hands of locally run projects on-the-ground, but we do know it isn’t nearly enough. Instead, most of the money has gone to large international NGOs and government programs instead of the local community groups or businesses who do the hard work of land restoration.

Africa’s investment gap is an offshoot of a global problem: funding to reverse land degradation and combat desertification — Sustainable Development Goal 15.3 — falls short by over $300 billion a year.

Across the 34 member countries of AFR100 and the Great Green Wall, hundreds of locally run projects remain underfunded or entirely ignored. To put it bluntly, we are not on track to meet the continent’s ambitious goal to restore over 100 million hectares of degraded land by 2030, jeopardizing the ability of African nations to feed an estimated 2.5 billion people by 2050.

Currently, desertification affects 45% of Africa’s land, and 55% of that area is vulnerable to further degradation. If desertification continues to advance unchecked, the decline in revenue from cereal crops alone could cost $4.6 trillion from 2015 to 2030.
Why Invest in African Entrepreneurs Who are Combatting Land Degradation?

As we begin the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030), some of the world’s most influential restoration leaders have issued a rallying cry: We must invest in entrepreneurs who are leveraging sustainable agriculture and forestry value chains to create permanent jobs and regreen their ecosystems.

These locally led business models present a promising path to reverse decades of land degradation while creating jobs for the world’s youngest continent. Most of them don’t view restoration as charity, but as a way to bring their communities out of poverty while fighting climate change and restoring lost biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Some entrepreneurs are ready for — and others have received — investment, but many more need support to build up their business skills and capacity to absorb funding. A small company won’t be ready to receive a million-dollar investment. To this end, programs like WRI’s Land Accelerator Africa and the WEF’s UpLink Challenge are equipping budding entrepreneurs with the training and mentorship they need to collectively turn the tide against land degradation.

With over 2,000 Land Accelerator Africa applicants since 2018, one thing is certain: these innovators can create huge change with access to predictable and affordable funding.

For example, when land restoration companies thrive, they provide new sources of income for the farmers whose crops they buy and process; this presents an alternative to deforestation-linked agricultural expansion. They can also improve food security by cutting food loss and waste; repair soils damaged by chemical fertilizers; and build up resilience to climate-induced floods, droughts and landslides by growing the right trees on farms and terraced hills.

The smaller scale of these nascent businesses — the companies in the 2018 and 2019 Land Accelerator cohorts had an average revenue of $288,000 — gives them a surprising advantage. Their close connection to the areas where they work enables them to tailor their restoration strategies to the ecology of the landscape and the environmental, social and economic goals of the people living there.

This is good news for investors, too, particularly those who are embracing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards. Working with locally led businesses can ensure their investments will support activities that maximize ecological benefits, comply with local laws and regulations, and assist marginalized groups like women and young people, while still turning a profit.

Take, for example, Sadik ibn Abdulai. After seeing his homeland in northern Ghana slowly succumb to the encroaching Sahara Desert, ibn Abdulai turned to a small but mighty ally: bees. He founded Tilaa, a company that works with farmers to produce cashews, animal feed, honey and other bee products.

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