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8 new projects join forces to scale climate-smart agriculture

Uyole 03, an improved bean variety developed by CCAFS and partners. The bean is helping farmers to improve their lives and empowering women. Photo: Georgina Smith (CIAT)

The 4th call of the Food & Business Global Challenges Program, a collaboration between CCAFS and the Dutch government, kicks off with a focus on partnerships for climate-smart agriculture outcomes in East Africa. 

Eight projects working to scale climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices in East Africa were funded in the fourth call of the Food & Business Global Challenges Program (GCP4). In a kick-off meeting in Arusha, Tanzania, on February 6th and 7th, the eight projects joined forces to develop ways of working together to address the combined challenges of climate change and food insecurity. In a blog post on the Food & Business Knowledge Platform, Corinne Lamain (NWO WOTRO) offers her take on the projects and explains how the meeting fostered collaboration:  

Creating an enabling environment

The eight projects, which are aligned with ongoing CCAFS research, aim to create an enabling environment for CSA scaling. The projects address different aspects of this enabling environment, like inclusiveness of value chains and business models, and innovative finance mechanisms. The kick-off meeting was an opportunity for the projects to agree on a theory of change for the portfolio, and also identify cross-cutting objectives to collaborate towards. One example of a collaboration formed was among the projects focusing on dairy: these projects jointly developed a pathway to outcomes focusing on supporting institutional behaviour change around inclusive business models and low emissions development. 

Testing soil health in Western Kenya for a climate-smart soil protection and rehabilitation project. Photo: Georgina Smith (CIAT) 

Partnering to strengthen outcomes

To identify potential partnerships that can help the projects achieve their objectives, workshop participants mapped similar initiatives and networks in East Africa. The implementing consortia also engaged government representatives of relevant ministries in three countries in the region, who offered their insights on the policy context, as well as regional organizations, whose input provided valuable perspective on the proposed impact pathways.  

Read the original story by Corinne Lamain on the Food & Business Knowledge Platform website: Scaling Climate Smart Agriculture in East Africa

Learn more about the eight projects:

The GCP4 is a collaboration between CCAFS, NWO-WOTRO and the Food & Business Knowledge Platform, under the recently established NL-CGIAR partnership. 

Marissa Van Epp is the Global Communications and Knowledge Manager for the CCAFS Project Management Unit.