Cubango-Okavango River Basin Fund

The riparian sates of Angola, Botswana and Namibia jointly established the Cubango-Okavango River Basin Fund (CORB Fund), as a Company Limited by guarantee in Botswana on 11th December 2019. The Fund is a fully independent hybrid fund that aims to enhance livelihoods, improve ecosystem resilience and provide equitable benefits to the riparian states of Angola, Botswana and Namibia, in their shared river basin. The CORB Fund offers  a mechanism to ensure that any plans for the development of the Basin can be balanced with measures to ensure the maintenance of its ecosystems’ integrity, as well as the prosperity of its residents. It represents an asset-based and collaborative path forward and the Fund aims to catalyse significant long- term investments across sectors that promote a Resilient Development trajectory.

The CORB Fund would contribute to the practical realisation of the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the realisation of numerous Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Fund’s interventions would create impacts that directly address:

1. Food security and hunge(SDG 2)
2. Improve infrastructure backlogs (SDG 11)
3. Improve water and sanitation service delivery (SDG 6)
4. Enhance ecosystem health and functioning (SDG 15)
5. Develop better human settlements (SDG 11)

In turn, advancement toward these SDGs would bolster progress against the broader SDGs pertaining to poverty eradication (SDG 1), health and wellbeing (SDG 3), inclusive economic opportunity (SDG 8), inequality reduction (SDG 10), and addressing climate change (SDG 13). This relationship is demonstrated in Figure 3. Support for interventions that contribute to addressing the compounding socio-economic, environmental, political, and climatic challenges in the CORB would also allow the Fund and the Member States to uphold and make meaningful contributions to numerous other international commitments, including the Convention of Biological Diversity, the UN Convention on Climate Change, and the Convention on Wetlands.