Niger says 2.5 million suffering food insecurity

Africa Daily via AFP: More than 2.5 million people in Niger are suffering from food insecurity because of a shortfall in the cereal harvest due to bad weather and crop pests, the agriculture minister said Saturday.

"A survey conducted since December 2014 indicated that 15.7 percent of the population, or 2,588,128 people, are in a situation of food insecurity, including 410,297 in severe insecurity," Maidagi Allambeye told MPs. The situation has been aggravated by the presence of some 200,000 refugees who had fled attacks by Boko Haram and other militants.

Food insecurity in the poor Sahel country, which is plagued by recurring food crises, is linked to a cereal deficit of more than 230,000 tonnes at the end of the 2014 crop year, he explained. The government attributed the shortfall to drought, floods and caterpillar attacks.

"We cannot say that Niger is suffering chronic insecurity but this is still very common," said Vigno Hounkanli, a spokesman for the World Food Programme in Niamey, which has helped some 480,000 people since June...

Locator map of Niger by Vardion, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Twelve dead, 36,000 homeless in Niger flooding

Reuters: At least 12 people have been killed and more than 36,000 made homeless in Niger due to flooding caused by heavy seasonal rainfall, the government said.

Floods are an annually recurring problem in the West African country during the rainy season when overflowing streams and rivers sweep away homes and destroy crops, leaving victims without shelter and creating food shortages later on.

"Heavy precipitation recorded in six regions caused flooding and serious damage," the office of Niger's prime minister said in a statement late on Friday. "Evaluations by the civil protection services uncovered 12 deaths."

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), citing government figures, said that 36,441 people had lost their homes in the floods as of Aug. 21.

"The rains are continuing and the damage could require the deployment of more means in terms of emergency food and non-food assistance and tents," OCHA said in a statement...

Locator map of Niger by Rei-artur, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

Nigeria-Niger Joint Commission discuss measures to curb flooding

AllAfrica.com via the Daily Independent (Lagos): The Nigeria-Niger Joint Commission for Cooperation on Mondaypledged to identify protective measures against flooding in the two countries. The Secretary-General of the commission, Alhaji Abduljalil Sulaiman, said this at the opening of the meeting of the Standing Committee of experts on Water Resources in Sokoto.

Sulaiman said that the commission invited experts in order to provide the people of Nigeria and Niger with satisfactory responses to their multi-faceted and legitimate expectations.

"The experts were invited to thoroughly and attentively consider all the agenda items and come up with pertinent recommendations which will enable the NNJC to overcome and even strike out barriers affecting the equitable sharing of common Water resources."

Sulaiman also said that the committee was saddled with the responsibility of examining and adopting the terms of reference of the feasibility study of the Dole-Kaina Area. "This is in order to identify protective measures against flood therein, with a view to promoting the development of socio-economic activities."...

On the banks of the Niger River in Niamey, Niger, shot by http://www.flickr.com/people/rolandh/ Roland (diasUndKompott), Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

West Africa hopes new hydropower dams will cut poverty, climate risk

Elias Ntungwe Ngalame at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: West African states in the Niger River Basin are seeking to tackle climate risks and reduce poverty by constructing three hydropower dams in the next five years. In late November, the Council of Ministers of the Niger Basin Authority (NBA), meeting in Cameroon’s capital Yaounde, endorsed an environmental and climate action plan for sustainable management of the scenic basin and its rich natural resources, which have come under threat from climate change.

The projects include a 102 megawatt (MW) hydropower dam at Fomi in Guinea, a 25 MW hydropower plant in Toussa, Mali, and the 565 MW Kandadji dam in Niger. These aim to boost hydro-electricity and irrigation, reduce desertification and flooding, and improve economic activities across the region.

“The West African region is facing urgent problems of food security, rural poverty and climate change that demand answers in the form of investment and infrastructure. We need to give a push to these three multi-purpose hydropower dam projects as a sustainable solution that involves the region’s largest river,” NBA executive secretary Collins Ihekire said in a statement at the Yaounde gathering.

The NBA is the coordinating body for the 4,200 km-long (2,600-mile) Niger River, bringing together the governments of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Nigeria.

The NBA also agreed to rehabilitate three hydropower plants at Kainji, Jebda and Lagdo, as well as multiple run-of-river hydropower stations, optimise water storage, set up irrigation schemes for an additional 1 million hectares (2.5 million hectares) of land, and increase hydropower production to 1,000 gigawatt hours per day.

“Integrating future climate change adaptation and mitigation into our development action plan will enable...sustainable management of our water resources, to better the livelihood of the over 106 million population in the area,” said Emmanuel Nganou Djoumesi, Cameroon’s minister of the economy, planning and regional development, at the closing of the Yaounde meeting....

The Niger River from space

Renewed flooding threatens Niger capital

Terra Daily via AFP: Renewed flooding of the Niger river threatens Niger's capital Niamey and parts of the west of the country, local and regional authorities warned Thursday.

Previous floods in August and September claimed almost 70 lives across the impoverished west African country and made tens of thousands homeless.

"We will be inundated" as of December 5, Niamey governor Aichatou Kane Boulama told a press briefing. She stressed that the consequences would include the flooding of 400 hectares (988 acres), 40 of them in residential areas.

Water has already begun to swamp some low-lying parts of Niamey, Kane Boulama added, saying that "the most urgent thing is to rehouse families"...

Livestock grazing on an island in the River Niger, as seen off a bridge in Niger’s capital, Niamey. Shot by ILRI/Stevie Mann, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Niger's farmers must prepare for more flooding

IRIN: ... [In Niger, an] inter-ministerial committee set up to assess and help manage flood damage estimates 700 fields in the Tillabéri region where Niamey is located, were flooded this year. Ayouba Hassane, director-general of the Federation of Rice Producer Cooperatives, said 14,000 tons of paddy rice have been destroyed since July.

Rice farmers usually produce 80,000 tons of the country’s annual 130,000 ton production during the rainy season, while a further 200,000-300,000 tons of rice is imported each year.  The Niger Basin Authority (ABN) predicts further flooding from mid-November based on the annual rising of the River Niger which occurs both during the rainy season and as river water from neighbouring countries such as Guinea and Mali eventually reaches Niger in mid-November to January.

According to ABN, the swell will be bigger this year than in recent years.  Residents along the river say it is already rising again, despite there having been no rain in a month. “This is a normal phenomenon, but excessive rise can cause new floods,” said Valerie Batselaere, head of NGO Oxfam in Niger.

Flooding between July and October killed 81 people and affected 520,000 - hundreds of thousands of them displaced - according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The government called it the worst flooding in decades.

...Drainage ditches and flood barriers are urgently needed to protect farmers along the river, said a September 2012 study by NGOs ACTED and Oxfam, and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).  The same study revealed that among Nigeriens displaced by floods, by far the most vulnerable were the 18 percent who were farmers or market gardeners relying solely on agriculture to get by....

Tuareg goatherders in Niger, shot by Stefano Manca http://www.flickr.com/people/7978937@N06/, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

France sends emergency anti-locust aid

Seed Daily via UPI: France said this week it is mobilizing emergency efforts to stop locust swarms in Africa's Sahel from spreading farther into drought-stricken Niger and Mali. The French Foreign Ministry said Tuesday it had released $1 million in emergency funding targeted to Niger -- the country currently most affected -- through a contribution to National Center for Locust Control in Mauritania.

Part of the funding will also go to help in a regional response to the locust swarms though an emergency fund set up by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. The latter effort will be aimed at surveying and controlling locust in Mali, where militant Islamists and Tuareg rebels have used the chaos created by the March overthrow of President Amadou Toumani Toure to seize control of the northern part of the country.

"Groups of desert locusts have been identified in recent weeks in the northern part of the Sahelian strip by the surveillance system set up by the countries of the region," the French ministry said in a statement. "These groups were notably found in northern Niger and Mali where insecurity could hamper the necessary survey and control operations."

The spread of this locust invasion to the southern part of the Sahel region, Paris said, "would have disastrous consequences, resulting in the loss of crops and the prospect of a worsening food crisis."...

A desert locust in Niger, shot by Christiaan Kooyman, public domain

Niger, Mali on alert for desert locust risk

Food and Agriculture Organization Media Center: Croplands in Niger and Mali are at imminent risk from Desert Locust swarms that are moving southward from Algeria and Libya, FAO warned today. Groups of locusts have recently been found in northern Niger, arriving from infestations further north.

FAO says locust-control efforts in the region are being hindered by continued insecurity along both sides of the Algerian-Libyan border. Political insecurity and conflict in Mali could also hamper monitoring and control efforts if the locusts reach that country.

Locust infestations were first reported in southwest Libya near Ghat in January 2012 and in southeast Algeria.  In late March, FAO warned that swarms could arrive in Niger and Mali by June. Continued rains and the resulting growth of vegetation led to the formation of swarms by mid-May.

“How many locusts there are and how far they move will depend on two major factors – the effectiveness of current control efforts in Algeria and Libya and upcoming rainfall in the Sahel of West Africa,” said Keith Cressman, FAO Senior Locust Forecasting Officer.

Both Algeria and Libya have been working hard to treat infested areas, covering a total of 40 000 hectares in Algeria and 21 000 hectares in Libya as of the end of May.

"In a normal year, Algeria and Libya would have been able to control most of the local swarms and prevent their movement towards the south, but insecurity along both sides of the Algerian-Libyan border is getting in the way of full access by local teams and by FAO experts who need to assess the situation. Libya’s capacity to carry out control efforts has also been affected in the past year,” Cressman explained...

A desert locust, shot by AtelierMonpli, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Rio+20 should make sustainable land use a top priority

Luc Gnacadja in SciDev.net: Severe droughts in Africa are a stark reminder of global unfairness. About 13 million people still struggle to have enough food in the Horn of Africa, and about the same number, most of them children, suffer from hunger in the Sahel region, which stretches across Africa below the Sahara. Droughts now hit these parts of Sub-Saharan Africa more frequently than the usual ten-year cycle, and more severely. And people living there are the least responsible for this climatic change.

...Now, the latest reports from early warning systems predict a crisis in both the Horn of Africa and Sahel again this year, when they have not yet recovered from the 2010 and 2011 droughts. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Farmers in the Maradi and Zinder regions of Niger know what to do. During the past 20 years they have protected trees on some five million hectares of farmland. Where they had no trees or only a few per hectare, they now have up to 120. These trees not only improve soil fertility but also provide about a million households with fodder, fruit and firewood.

A recent survey shows that the farmers who preserve trees are able to cope better with drought than other farmers in the same area. Some of them even produced a modest cereal surplus in 2011. This is just one example of highly successful sustainable land management on a grassroots level. Another is Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer in Burkina Faso who featured in the documentary film, The Man Who Stopped the Desert. He has combined tree and crop planting techniques to turn the barren land in his village into a 15 hectare cultivated forest within three decades....

Meeting under a baobab tree in Niger, shot by ACEI Cheung, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Niger braces itself for year of food and aid emergency

Mark Tran in the Guardian's "globaldevelopment" blog: As Niger braces itself for a food emergency after late and erratic rains last year and a surge in food prices, humanitarian agencies are stepping up malnutrition screening so that children receive swift treatment to prevent permanent damage. It is also much less costly.

At the best of times this vast landlocked country – whose estimated 14.7 million people mostly live along a narrow strip of arable land on its southern border – has trouble feeding itself. Even in "non-crisis" years, 300,000 children are treated for malnutrition – 15% of the world total. This year threatens to be particularly severe.

Humanitarian organisations estimate that 1.3 million people are suffering from acute malnutrition across the Sahel, a belt of countries from Mauritania and Senegal on the Atlantic to Chad in central Africa, taking in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. These countries suffer from chronic food insecurity – families without enough money to meet their food needs – and 300,000 children die in a normal year from malnutrition or its related causes.

Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary, on Sunday announced emergency aid for the Sahel and urged others to step up efforts. The UK is providing therapeutic food for 68,000 children in Chad, Niger and Mali as well as fodder and vaccinations for livestock. "British support will help those in the most immediate danger but other nations must take up the baton to ensure that the international response is fast and effective," Mitchell said. "We then need to improve conditions for these people to withstand future droughts."...

Africa's great 'water grab'

Claire Provost in the Guardian (UK): The banks of the Niger river, in southern Mali, have been flooded by a steady stream of foreigners. Coveted by foreign investors eager to snap up large tracts of fertile farmland, the river basin has been at the centre of a race to get hold of African land at rock-bottom prices. Meanwhile, last week, hundreds of smallholder farmers and civil society activists flocked to the same river basin for the first international conference to tackle the global rush for land.

West Africa's largest river, the Niger is thought to sustain over 100 million people as it snakes 4,180km through Guinea, Mali and Niger before emptying into Nigeria's colossal Niger Delta. In Mali, the Office du Niger is home to the vast majority of the country's largescale land deals, seen by campaigners as emblematic of the "land grabs" taking place in developing countries. Recent estimates suggest that foreign investment in Mali's limited arable land jumped by 60% between 2009 and 2010. But the potential knock-on effects of these land deals on local communities' access to water has rarely made it centre-stage.

Ongoing research from the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development seeks to redress this blindspot, honing in on how such land deals might affect water access for fishing, farming and pastoralist communities. In a policy paper out on Thursday, the IIED's Jamie Skinner and Lorenzo Cotula warn that an alarming number of African governments seem to be signing away water rights for decades, with major implications for local communities.

Investors in farmland are, understandably, after land with high growing potential – either land with lots of rainfall or land that can be irrigated. What Skinner and Cotula note is a worrying trend where governments are being rushed into signing away water rights during negotiations where they were initially only considering leasing land...

A canoe on the Niger River at sunset, Guinea, shot by L. Lartigue

Building resilience in the Sahel

IRIN: In 2005, drought and famine hit the Sahel, claiming many lives. The pattern was repeated in 2010, with the crisis most acute in Niger. And now the early warning signs are there for problems again next year, in 2012.

Sahelians have always had their ways of coping with bad years. Not so long ago the cycle could be tracked by the size of women’s gold earrings. In major drought years the gold would have to be sold, and for a time the women would wear replica ornaments of painted tin. Then gradually they could start to buy gold again, until eventually their earrings were back to their former size.

But successive droughts, coming this close together, tax families’ resilience to the limits. Not just gold has to be sold, but productive assets too - livestock, tools and land - making it almost impossible for the family ever to get back to its position before the crisis. A government study of 14 agro-pastoral areas in Niger found that pastoralists with small herds had on average lost 90 percent of their livestock due to successive droughts. International aid has kept people alive - more successfully in 2010 than in 2005 - but it has not stopped this kind of progressive impoverishment.

After the 2005 famine, the Sahel Working group, an informal grouping of UK and other European aid agencies, commissioned a study (entitled Beyond Any Drought) - on the lessons which could be learned from the way the crisis had been handled. Now its author, Peter Gubbels of Groundswell International, has repeated the exercise. The new publication, Escaping the Hunger Cycle; Pathways to Resilience in the Sahel, looks at what happened in 2010, what has changed for the better, what challenges remain, and what can be learned for the future.

One of the continuing problems identified in the report, and one which still has not been solved, is a conceptual issue of how you think about crisis and normality in areas where child malnutrition is always at a level which would elsewhere denote an emergency situation....

"Drought has turned farmland into useless soil and sand" A farmer examines the soil in drought stricken Niger during the 2005 famine. Still from a Voice of America TV report

Carbon imperialism devastating Africa

Tony Iltis in Green Left Weekly (Australia): For five centuries, Africa has suffered at the hands of the West. Starting with the slave trade, through the colonial era, to today’s neoliberal global economy, the development of industrial capitalism in the West has come at a terrible price paid by Africans.

Food riots in Mozambique early this month and looming mass starvation in Niger after floods that were preceded by years of drought both reflect the ongoing economic exploitation. However, they also reflect another creation of the industrialised West adversely affecting Africa: climate change.

Parallels can be made between the drought and floods in Niger and those that are taking place in the Australian state of Victoria. Both are in historically drought-prone areas that experience occasional flooding. However, in both instances, the weather events are more extreme than in the past, in line with climate scientist predictions about the effects of climate change. On June 22, Niger’s hottest ever temperature was recorded in Bilma — 47.1ºC.

There are differences, however. Niger has been responsible for only a tiny proportion of the carbon dioxide and methane emissions that cause climate change.Another difference is in the human cost. The Victorian floods have caused hardship, and drought has created ongoing economic and social distress in much of rural Australia (including high levels of suicide).

However, the suffering in Niger is on a different scale. Reuters said on January 28 that the Nigerien government was already reporting that 7.8 million people (half the population) were facing malnutrition. By August, 12 million Nigeriens were facing food insecurity and 400,000 children were in danger of starvation, the August 1 Guardian said.

…A report released by Friends of the Earth International (FoEI ) on August 30 revealed that, despite the food insecurity caused by dependence on imported food, 183,000 hectares of agricultural land in Mozambique has become foreign-owned commercial plantations growing jatropha, a toxic plant used to make biodiesel….

Extreme weather starving Chad and Niger

Alanna Shaikh in UN Dispatch: Ten million people are at risk for starvation in Chad and Niger. 400,000 children are at risk in Niger alone. Years of crop-destroying drought are being followed by flash floods. The drought has been causing hunger for years, destroying crops and livestock. Now, the floods have wiped out what’s left.

It was already bad in both Niger and Chad … The floods make it dramatically worse. It’s not just the floods making things worse; international aid has fallen short. At a time where need is growing, food aid is shrinking. The World Food Programme, according to Oxfam, “has had to scale back its £57m operation to feed eight million people in Niger and instead concentrate its efforts on the most vulnerable – children under two…” In addition to the damage done by starvation, people in the flood areas are not at risk for waterborne diseases. That means, diarrhea (the kind that kills children), malaria, and respiratory ailments….

Floods in Niger displace 200,000

Voice of America: The United Nations is appealing for help for Niger, where it says floods have displaced nearly 200,000 people in recent weeks. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says shelter materials and blankets are urgently needed.

Food and mosquito netting are also in short supply. The floods are compounding the misery in Niger, which was already experiencing a severe drought and food shortages before the rains hit….

Two die as floods hit drought-stricken Niger

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Two children were killed after heavy rains in drought-stricken Niger left nearly 70,000 people homeless, UN sources and state television said Saturday. The children died Friday in the central southern region of Maradi when a wall of their home in the town of Tessaoua collapsed, the television reported.

The deaths brought to six the number of people killed since the end of July as a result of severe rains and the worst flooding of the Niger river for more than 80 years. United Nations agencies said that between August 9 and 12 a total of 67,818 people had lost their homes in Maradi, the capital Niamey, Zinder and Diffa regions in the east, Tahoua and Tilleberi in the west and even Agadez in the northern desert….

Millions face starvation as Niger prays in vain for rain

Alastair Stewart in the Independent (UK): To the north of Niger, the creeping Sahara; to the south, oil rich and agriculturally lush Nigeria – this nation straddles the Sahel – dry, hot and cruel. It has suffered catastrophic droughts – 1974, 1984 and 2005. And now, another. Five times the size of the United Kingdom, Niger is one of the poorest nations on earth with child mortality worse than Afghanistan. The absence of regular rainfall throughout 2009 has led to poor harvests, lack of grazing for animals and food reserves exhausted.

Hungry people have started adding "bitter" berries to their diet – this is survival food, normally unpalatable but when starving, the unpalatable becomes welcome – essential. The tipping point, according to one expert is about a week away – 15 July. That is when the rainy season is expected. But the starving livestock may nibble away whatever green-shoots push through.

Ten leading aid agencies launched a joint appeal yesterday, warning that up to 10 million people across the eastern Sahel, faced acute hunger. The United Nations agrees, it says that the situation is of a magnitude not previously seen. Niger is at the centre of this crisis, with half of its population – 7 million people – going hungry.

The statistics, generally, for this West African country, are overwhelming – less than a third of the people are literate: boys spend on average five years in school; girls, just three. Two-thirds of the people of Niger live beneath the poverty line, 85 per cent on less than $2 – or £1 – a day.

But set that against these great ironies: Niger has uranium aplenty and sells it to France's burgeoning nuclear power industry. The fruits of this trade are hard to see. And there is oil, as in northern neighbour Libya. The partners are the Chinese who will begin production soon. Again, there is little hope the benefits of geological benevolence will bless these beleaguered people.…

The "tree of Ténéré" is an important orientation point in the desert of Northern Niger, shot by Holger Reineccius, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Sahel faces new food crisis

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Only five years after a severe food shortage north-central Africa is again fearing the worst before the September harvest, with 10 million people threatened in this arid region known as the Sahel. In Niger alone, the country hardest hit, more than seven million residents -- nearly half the population -- are in need of food, and both Niger and neighboring Chad have declared states of emergency.

Niger's south-central Maradi region is a testament to things again gone wrong: villages and schools lie deserted after hundreds of people fled drought and hunger, some moving to the cities while others headed south to Nigeria. Animals are dying from lack of fodder and water. "This is the worst crisis in 30 years", worse than 1984 or 2005, Alio Mahamane, a member of Niger's farmers organisation, told AFP.

Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad and Mali are similarly affected, after last year's insufficient or irregular rains left poor crops and a desperate shortage of cattle feed in a region already suffering endemic malnutrition. The situation has triggered appeals for international aid for this belt spanning the southern flank of the Sahara Desert….

Aerial view of Gobero archaeological site in Niger from Holocene, from Sereno P.C., Garcea E.A.A., Jousse H., Stojanowski C.M., Saliège J-F., et al. 2008. Lakeside Cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 Years of Holocene Population and Environmental Change. PLoS ONE 3(8): e2995. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002995 Figure 2, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license

Hundreds flock from Niger to Nigeria in search of food

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Hundreds of Niger nationals, mostly women and children, have flooded into neighbouring Nigeria in search of food, officials and residents said on Friday. "We are aware of the recent influx of people from Niger into some parts of (southern) Katsina State," Sani Makana, the state agriculture commissioner told AFP by phone from the state capital Katsina.

The number of of Niger nationals in northern Katsina state, which shares a land border with Nigeria, has soared in the past two months, residents said. Makana said some were so desperate they had been forced to beg door-to-door.

"It is a pathetic sight. They just have nothing to live on and have to beg to eat," said Katsina resident, Abubakar Shehu. "When you ask them why they came here they tell you that they were starving in Niger... and would die if they stayed," Shehu said.

According to the United Nations around 7.8 million Nigeriens are in need of food, out of the around 10 million affected by a crisis in the Sahel region….

Six African Countries funded to ease climate adaptation

Environment News Service: A total of $1.1 billion in new financing will flow to six African countries to assist them in developing renewable energy and preparing for the consequences of climate change. From solar water heaters to wind energy to development policy planning, a range of new, scalable investments were given the green light October 27 at Trustee meetings of the Climate Investment Funds in Washington. Agreed in 2008, donor countries have pledged over US$6 billion to the Climate Investment Funds.

Mozambique, Niger and Zambia will each receive up to $50-70 million in additional funding to help transform their economies through climate resilience. Morocco and South Africa will join Egypt in receiving very low-interest loans for $150 million, $500 million, and $300 million respectively, to strengthen their investments in clean energy in support of national priorities for low carbon development.

"Climate Investment Funds' support for Africa is coming at a critical time. Climate change has the potential to turn back the clock on hard won development gains across the continent," said Katherine Sierra, vice president of sustainable development at the World Bank.

"CIF financing is teaching us how to work together with governments, civil society and the private sector to make truly transformational investments a reality. Each CIF dollar so far is leveraging an additional 10 dollars in private and public investments," Sierra said….