Africa-Press – Sierra-Leone. Freetown City Council won the Bloomberg Global Mayor’s Challenge in 2021 along with 14 other cities. Our winning proposal was the development of a sustainability model for “Freetown The Tree Town” that includes a carbon offset investment platform linked to our digital tree database.
Due to certain administrative issues, project implementation was delayed for all the 15 winning cities. We are thrilled that implementation has finally started and today we received a delegation from Bloomberg’s implementing partners Delivery Associates and UNDP.
We had an excellent kick off session on the 15th of January 2024, followed by a visit to tree planting locations in the Jah Kingdom community near Juba where 13,000 trees have been planted.
It was great to see the impact of the tree planting in a community where many lost their lives during the 14th August 2017 mudslide.
Community based growers demonstrated their knowledge of the trees, showing us the different species, which included avocados, mangoes, sweet sop, acacia and other indigenous trees!
The Delivery Associates and UNDP team will be here for 10 days after which we will move into full project implementation.
This further sustainability investment into Freetown The Tree Town complements funding from two World Bank projects that financed 85% of the cost of planting 977,000 trees, and are being actively tracked.
The creation of over 1,000 jobs so far is an added benefit of tree planting and more jobs will be created as planting continues in Freetown.
For More News And Analysis About Sierra-Leone Follow Africa-Press
