Freetown, Western Area Peninsula Water Fund Business Case Technical Reports
What is Water Fund?
The Water Fund creates and enhances financial and governance mechanisms to protect and restore the National Park. It unites public, private, and civil society stakeholders around a common goal, and contributes to water security through nature-based solutions and sustainable watershed management.
Vision and Mission for the Water Fund
The vision for the Western Area Peninsula Water Fund is a restored WAPNP that provides biodiversity and clean water benefits to the Greater Freetown Area. The Water Fund’s mission is to restore the watersheds within the WAPNP so that they can supply the quantity and quality of water needed for all users in the Greater Freetown Area while improving the livelihoods of the people in the watershed, conserving the area’s rich biodiversity, and building resilience to acute shocks — in the context of a changing climate.
GOAL
The Western Area Peninsula Water Fund and its partners aim to restore the integrity of the Western Area Peninsula National Park to provide the quality and quantity of water to meet the water demand of Freetown.
Approach
Nature-based solutions represent an effective and financially sound means to address the growing water security challenges facing Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown and the surrounding Western Area Peninsula region.
Project Location
The project is being implemented in the Western Area Peninsula National Park and surrounding areas in Freetown, targeting catchments that are under significant threat from encroachment. The project area became a national park in 2012, having an area of 17,688 hectares (68.29 sq mi).
The Western Area Peninsula, which is part of the Upper Guinean Forest Ecosystem, is located on the west coast of the country and is home to roughly 1 to 1. 5 million people (20% of the country’s total population).
The Challenges
The Western Area Peninsula is under serious threat, jeopardizing Freetown’s water source. Protecting the Western Area Peninsula is important to you and your family.
• Deforestation is happening faster and more widely in the Western Area Peninsula National Park.
• Deforestation leads to water shortages, flooding, landslides and poverty.
Interventions include:
• Natural climate solutions – protection, restoration, and improved land management actions.
• Forest and landscape restoration – restoring ecological functionality and enhancing human well-being across deforested or degraded forest landscapes.
• Biodiversity conservation – protecting and preserving species, habitats, ecosystems, and genetic diversity.
• Effective watershed protection – increasing the number of game guards, training and equipping game guards, improving National
Park management.
Impact of Western Area Peninsula Water Fund Interventions
- Improved water security
- mitigation of flood and landslides
- sustainable rural livelihoods
- nature based tourism
- carbon storage
- biodiversity conservation
Western Area Peninsula Water Fund
Western Area Peninsula Water Fund Business Case report
Western Area Peninsula (WAP) Water Fund Economic Report
Urban and Rural Morphological Modeling Methodology and Results
Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) report
Report on Stakeholder Assessment of the Western Area Water Catchment Areas
Report on Stakeholder Assessment of the Western Area Water Catchments – Appendices
