The French Development Agency (AFD) has launched a call for expressions of interest for research on “scaling up nature-based solutions and large-scale ecological restoration”. This initiative covers several African countries.
The call is part of the biodiversity research program “Fostering the development of a pro-nature economy” (ECOPRONAT). This initiative aims to develop knowledge and methodologies to integrate biodiversity into the policies and different sectors of intervention of the AFD Group, mobilize financial resources and build capacity.
The call for projects open until February 4th, 2022 concerns several areas related to development in African countries, notably agriculture, including forestry and livestock. Projects dealing with land use planning likely to be validated by AFD will necessarily have a link with the issues of infrastructure development, space consumption and land artificialisation. The call for expressions of interest also covers urban development.
Research intentions
According to AFD, this call for expressions of interest will make it possible to pre-select particularly promising research intentions, whose promoters will then be invited to develop, during a second phase, a complete proposal for final selection. At least four projects will be selected at the end of the process. The initiative is open to universities and research centers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private foundations, international research centers, and companies (including individual consulting firms).
However, these organizations will have to make public all of their research work. AFD is allocating 890,000 euros to this call for projects, with 225,000 euros for each selected research project. The initiative concerns all of AFD’s countries of intervention, with a non-exclusive priority given to countries eligible for the Biodev 2030 initiative, which aims to preserve biodiversity and restore degraded ecosystems. In Africa, the call for projects covers Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Senegal, Tunisia and Uganda.
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