East Africa

By Caity Peterson

Abrar Chaudhury isn’t a fan of top down adaptation costing. “Top down, purely econometric approaches usually way underestimate the true costs of adaptation,” he says. But he also says that a bottom up, community directed approach isn’t the absolute answer either. “The real story,” he asserts, “is in the difference between the two.”

Chaudhury’s work involves the use of a new community adaptation prioritization and planning tool called Participatory Social Return on Investment (PSROI). PSROI builds on traditional Social Return on Investment methods – which normal focus on economic analysis of pre-determined interventions – by integrating a participatory, community-driven component. 

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By Laura Cramer

The people of Kamuana village in the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) benchmark site in Nyando, Kenya have a vision for their community that involves increased forest cover, improved agricultural practices and yields, better roads, and more schools. The details of this vision were explained to CCAFS researchers who were conducting a village baseline study at the site in May 2011. The newly-published Nyando village baseline study is part of the CCAFS baseline – with household, village and organisation levels - implemented across all our sites in Eastern Africa, West Africa and South Asia. The results of the study, and of those conducted in CCAFS’ two target sites in Uganda (Albertine Rift and Kagera Basin) are now available, and the reports for the other sites will be available soon.  Read more »

By Joana Roque de Pinho

Maasai pastoralists in East Africa are using video to share their stories and experiences about coping with seasonal and annual climatic variability. As climatic changes intensify in the region, their livestock-dependent livelihoods are ever more vulnerable to increasingly frequent droughts and other extreme events.

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by Tabitha Muchaba, Catherine Mungai, Maren Radeny and Olive Thiong’o

In order to build capacity for evidence-informed policy making and enhance science to policy dialogue, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) East Africa program hosted the second workshop of the Regional Learning Partnership (RLP) in June, 2012 in Arusha, Tanzania.

Launched in April 2011, the RLP is a pathway for policy engagement from local to regional scales and brings together 16 African organizations in agriculture, climate change and food security from Southern and Eastern Africa. The workshop brought together over 20 participants from regional economic and inter-governmental organizations, research institutions, universities, NGOs, farmer organizations, and the private sector to define key national, regional and international outputs and outcomes for 2013.

Discussions over the two days of the workshop focused on four key areas: Read more »