Signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Lake Chad Basin Commission and the African Development Bank Group
Sheraton Hotel, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Saturday 17 February 2024 – On the sidelines of the 37th Assembly of Heads of State of the African Union, the Executive Secretary of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), Ambassador Mamman Nuhu, and the President of the African Development Bank Group (AfDB), Dr Akinwumi Adesina, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to further enhance the beneficial relations between LCBC and the AfDB. The MoU will cover efforts to mobilize resources for infrastructural development, strengthen the institutional capacity of the LCBC to better manage the natural resources of the region and to enhance the living conditions of the people of the basin.
Under the MOU, the Bank will use its convening power to mobilize investments and technical resources to rehabilitate the basin’s degraded ecosystems, enhance climate-smart water resource management and development, and consequently improve livelihoods of the people of the area.
For over twenty years, the AfDB has continued to finance multinational projects in the basin’s water, transport, environment, and social sectors with an investment portfolio of about $241.3 million in the region.
Once the world’s sixth-largest inland water body covering about 25,000 km² in the 1960s, the Lake Chad began shrinking significantly in the 1970s due to climate change variability, population growth and corresponding increase in anthropogenic activities in the area. The shrinkage, coupled with endemic poverty and high rates of youth unemployment in the riparian countries of the lake—Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad— continues to threaten the well-being of the estimated 50 million people in the basin who depend on the Lake for their livelihood and over 2 million others who live along its shores.
