A new partnership formed between Africa Wildlife Foundation and the Government of Rwanda assures the promotion of innovative financing to rehabilitate protected areas, building capacity in fighting climate change and conserving protected areas among others, an official source revealed Tuesday in Kigali.
Kaddu Sebunya, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Africa Wildlife Foundation said that they are going to start developing action plans and programmes that could be implemented around the new Memorandum Understanding signed between the organisation and the Rwandan government.
“The MoU is a defining partnership that our organization is going to have with the Ministry of Environment in Rwanda in implementing a lot of things that have to be designed,” he said.
Currently the organisation is partnering and working on expansion of Volcano National Park in the Northern Province of Rwanda.
“We look at conservation of landscape, natural assets to the economic aspirations and In the case of Rwanda, streamlining the role of biodiversity in Rwanda’s development goals and implementing areas that support economic development of Rwanda,” Sebunya said.
Among other key projects to which these interventions will focus on include the conservation of Gishwati-Mukura, a reserve was restored at the cost of $9.5 million since 2014 in Western Rwanda near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The newly established natural reserve which is being turned into a national park is home to a group of 20 chimpanzees who live alongside golden monkeys, l’hoest’s and blue monkeys.
In addition, the reserve has a total of 395 species of birds and 492 indigenous plant species in the park.
CU/abj/APA