Plant for the Planet Ghana has launched a project to plant 10 million trees in Ghana at Banpewa, a community in the Bole district of the Savannah Region.
The project, dubbed ‘Plant for Ghana’, is being funded by donors across the world through Plant for the Planet, an international environmental non-governmental organisation. Plant-for-Ghana is a pioneer project of Plant for the Planet Ghana, under the umbrella of the Trillion Tree Campaign which is a project of Plan for the Planet Foundation.
The goal of this project is to address the multitude of issues associated with deforestation and to return global temperature rises to within two degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels, through reforestation and achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as well.
It will also augment the government’s Green Ghana project.
The chief of Banpewa, Nnaa Dr Agbaa Jaaga III, while expressing delight about the initiative at a ceremony to launch, bemoaned the bad nature of roads, which he said, scared investors away from the area.
He wondered why the government had not attached importance to a road that led to the biggest irrigation farm in West Africa.
“We plead with the government to come to our aid to construct the road from Bamboi to Babator where we have the irrigation project that is producing more than a million bags of maize, sorghum, rice and other cash crops two times every year. If the road is very bad, how can they improve and how can the farmers here cart their products to markets?”
The Ghana Country Director of Plant for the Planet, Mohammed Rabiu Dannakabu, said the Northern Savannah Ecological Zone of Ghana, which is made up of five geographic regions, will be the main focus for this project.
“We are starting with 25,000 trees this year in Banpewa. The Northern Savannah Ecological Zone which is made up of 5 geographic regions will be the main focus of the project but we’ll expand to other regions in Ghana.”
The Registrar of the Savannah regional house of chiefs, Abutu Kapori commended the chief of the area, Naa Agbaa Jaaga III for embracing the project.
He said the project fits into the house of chiefs’ efforts to reforest the degraded land in the region and assured that the other chiefs are ready to assist the planting of trees in their communities.
