Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Environment, Mr. Ibrahim Yusufu Idris has charged implementing Ministries, Departments and Agencies of the Agro-Climatic Resilience in Semi-Arid Landscapes (ACReSAL) to ensure proper supervision and monitoring of projects to achieve delivery of their mandate to the project.
Ibrahim Yusuf Idris is also the Chairman, Federal Technical Committee of the ACRESAL Project.
He gave the charge on Friday at the presentation of operational vehicles to some of the lead implementing MDAs on the ACReSAL Project.
The presentation of the vehicles was to enable the project realize it’s cardinal components of increasing landscapes restoration and enhance livelihoods in the participating states.
The Permanent Secretary said: “Even at personal level, if you invest your money, and do not supervise what is happening. You will lose.
“So you must move around to see what is happening. Where you have problems, you address these problems.”
Mr. Umar Abdulhamid, the National Project Coordinator disclosed that ACReSAl had an investment portfolio of 700 million US dollars to intervene and address issues surrounding landscapes degradation arising from desertification, deforestation brought about by Climate Change challenges, natural causes and human activities.
He said the impact had been enormous: “The project is a six -year lifespan project that just started a year ago.
“Our team has started actual implementation. Restoration of landscapes have started immensely.
“At the last count, we have actually been able to restore over 2,000 degraded landscapes.
“We have over 96,529 beneficiaries directly and the list is ongoing. Our expectation is that by mid-term review, we would have been able to deliver more than 60% of the goals and achievements at the land and ecosystem restoration level and the beneficiaries in total.
Some of the recipients of the operational vehicles were representatives from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, Federal Ministry of Water Resources and Sanitation, Nigeria Integrated Water Resources Management Commission, department of Climate Change – Federal Ministry of Environment.
Others were department of Forestry -Federal Ministry of Environment, National Space Research and Development Agency, department of Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought Management among others.
