ASARECA is implementing the Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) Project (https://aiccra.cgiar.org/) in partnership with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and apartners in the National Agricultural Research Systems in Eastern and Central Africa.
Funder
The AICCRA project is funded by the World Bank to the tune of USD 60million available to a host of partners globally. Of this, ASARECA receives USD 300, 000 for interventions in Ethiopia and Kenya.
Aim of the Project
The Project aims to strengthen the technical, institutional, and human capacity needed to enhance transfer of climate-relevant information, decision-making tools, and technologies in support of scaling efforts in IDA-eligible countries in Africa.
Development Objective
The Development Objective is to increase access for agriculture research and extension service providers in Africa to knowledge, technologies, and decision making tools relevant to enhancing the resilience of agriculture and food systems in the face of climate change.
- Results Area 1: Knowledge and tools needed to project likely impacts of climate change on agricultural systems available for use by beneficiaries in project area.
- Results Area 2: Climate-smart agriculture technologies available for upscaling in project area.
Why the Focus resilience of agriculture and food systems in the face of climate change:
The Project focuses on dealing with the impacts of climate change on livelihoods for the following reasons:
- Agriculture remains central to the livelihoods of millions of the people in Africa where food security throughout the region has recently deteriorated with the number of undernourished people in Africa rising from 195 million in 2006 to 256 million in 2018.
- The slowdown in productivity growth, combined with increasingly frequent food production failures, point to the need to significantly increase the productive capacity and strengthening the resilience of rural households throughout the region.
- The livelihoods of African farmers and livestock keepers, long known to be vulnerable to the vicissitudes of weather, are being severely impacted by climate change mainly due to El Nino-induced droughts and floods and drought and tropical storms.
- Therefore, strengthening the productivity and resilience of African agriculture will depend critically on the ability of governments and their partners to bring science and innovation to the forefront to improve climate adaptation of Africa’s food systems.
Countries of intervention
AICCRA supports programs in three agro-ecological zones in Africa – which are among most vulnerable to impacts of climate change the core countries of intervention are:
- Western Africa and Sahelian drylands (Ghana, Senegal, Mali)
- Eastern Africa dry lowlands to highlands (Ethiopia, Kenya)
- Southern Africa drylands (Zambia)
Cross-border, cross-regional spill-overs
The Project activities are expected to generate benefits that are expected to neighboring countries, which share similar challenges as well as agro-ecologies.
The project focuses on 4 major components namely
- Component 1: Knowledge generation and sharing through development of climate-informed agricultural advisory services and decision-making tools: This component supports generation and sharing of knowledge products and tools and platforms that address critical gaps in the design and provision of climate services, enable climate-informed investment planning, and support the design of policies to promote uptake of CSA practices.
- Component 2: Strengthening partnerships for delivery of climate-smart innovations in agriculture: This component support building of human and institutional capacities for multi-stakeholder partnerships and networks to strengthen the ability of actors all along the research-to-development continuum to anticipate climate effects and project their likely impacts on agriculture, food security, and rural livelihoods, with the goal of accelerating the identification, prioritization, and uptake of best-bet adaptive measures within defined application domains.
- Component 3. Supporting the Uptake of Climate-Smart Agriculture: This component supports the uptake of CSA among small-scale farmers and intermediaries in selected value chains by supporting the validation of CSA technologies in the field, linking validated CSA technologies to technology transfer systems, and improving assess to climate-informed agricultural advisory services that will help farmers and other value chain actors make better decisions about CSA technologies and practices.
- Component 4 is about the overall Project management.
Engagement with RECs
The Project leverages its impacts by engaging with Africa’s regional economic communities (RECs: ECOWAS (West Africa), IGAD (Horn of Africa), COMESA (eastern and southern Africa), and SADC (southern Africa); and their associated regional agricultural research networks are CORAF (West Africa), ASARECA (East Africa), and CCARDESA (southern Africa).