World Bank, Ethiopia Sign $500mln Grant Deal
ADDIS ABABA – Ethiopia finance ministry has signed a 500 million grant deal with the World Bank on Saturday.
Finance minister Ahmed Shide and Carolyn Turk, Country Director of the Bank, signed the grant deal which will be used to finance the implementation of climate action through a landscape management program.
The five-year program aims at increasing the adoption of sustainable land management practices and expanding access to secure land tenure in non-rangeland rural areas of the country.
The program is a sectoral budget support program with a results-based approach, according to the Ministry of Finance.
It will support the government to scale up participatory watershed and land management activities in order to reduce land degradation and rural land tenure security.
The program will make consideration for the equitable inclusion of all beneficiaries in the watershed users associations, including vulnerable groups such as landless, youth, elderly, and female-headed households.
World Bank Country Director Carolyn Turk said the program is expected to benefit rural households living on degraded land and estimated to support around 5,000 kebeles of Ethiopia’s highlands.
Almost 50 percent of Ethiopia’s highlands are currently defined as degraded and declining in productivity. It is costing the country about 2 to 3 percent of its annual agricultural GDP, she added.
Investing in land resources is vital to build resilient and equitable economic growth as well as to protect all of the works done so far, Turk added.
