Investing in Africa's Land Restoration Champions
Announcing a New TerraFund Cohort
In April, we called upon Africa's restoration champions to apply for funding and grow millions of trees.
600 organizations heard us in three landscapes: Kenya’s Greater Rift Valley, the Lake Kivu & Rusizi River Basin of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda, and the Ghana Cocoa Belt.
After a rigorous selection process, we are investing $17.8 million in 92 organizations and monitoring their impact over the next six years.
A Fund for Africa’s Land Restoration Champions
The degradation of 65% of the continent’s agricultural land threatens economic and environmental ruin. At the same time, the effects of climate change – lower crop yields, erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts – are making life harder. That’s why African countries have pledged to begin restoring 100 million hectares of land through the AFR100 Initiative.
Thousands of local innovators are pioneering projects that restore the land, grow trees, and create a prosperous future for Africa. Local is the key word here. Because communities manage nearly 70% of African land, only their leaders know what they need to thrive.
Despite their promise, few receive finance – and fewer can demonstrate their impact. That’s why we created TerraFund for AFR100 in 2021 to finance non-profit community organizations and for-profit businesses that restore Africa’s land.
After an extensive selection process in 2022, TerraFund deployed its first grants and loans of $50,000 to $500,000 to 100 of these innovators that work across 27 countries. Together, they make up TerraFund’s “Top 100” cohort.
Expanding with TerraFund for AFR100 Landscapes
After uncovering a network of restoration champions across Africa, we decided to concentrate our impact in three landscapes where hundreds of champions operated, government have made impressive commitments, and the need was greatest: Kenya’s Greater Rift Valley, the Lake Kivu & Rusizi River Basin of Burundi, DRC, and Rwanda, and the Ghana Cocoa Belt.
Thanks to support from the Bezos Earth Fund and The Audacious Project, we issued a second call for project proposals on the TerraMatch platform in April 2023 and received 601 applications.
After a rigorous selection process, we allocated $17.8 million to 78 non-profits and 14 enterprises through grants, loans, and equity investments.
Through 2030, the cohort will have significant impact:
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12.7 million
trees to grow
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47,000
hectares to restore
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52,000
jobs to create
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580,000
people to benefit
Monitoring Progress Through TerraMatch
TerraFund has developed a state-of-the-art approach to monitoring progress, combining field-collected data with insights from satellite technologies and data from Land & Carbon Lab. TerraMatch, an online platform, hosts and analyzes this data.
After extensive training and important feedback, the Top 100 champions have submitted three progress reports and collected geospatial data from hundreds of individual planting sites. These are the results.
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$15 million
invested in 100 projects
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12.5 million
trees growing
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36,000
jobs created
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202,000
people benefitted
Our Target Landscapes
TerraFund has made a long-term commitment to fund, train, and monitor restoration champions in these three landscapes through WRI’s Restore Local project.
Explore the maps below to see which organizations we have funded in each landscape. And learn more about how we selected these landscapes here.
Greater Rift Valley of Kenya
Lake Kivu & Rusizi River Basin
Ghana Cocoa Belt
Invest in Africa’s Land Restoration Champions
Are you an investor interested in funding Africa’s land restoration champions? Reach out to our team for further inquiry.
Partners
TerraFund for AFR100 is managed by World Resources Institute, One Tree Planted, Realize Impact and Barka in support of the AFR100 Initiative. Funders for the TerraFund for AFR100 Top 100 cohort include Bezos Earth Fund, Meta, Good Energies Foundation, Lyda Hill Philanthropies, DOEN Foundation, AKO Foundation, and Caterpillar Foundation. Bezos Earth Fund and The Audacious Project anchor the TerraFund for AFR100 Landscapes cohort.
