News

Projects implemented under the West African Agricultural Productivity Program (WAAPP) in Benin, Guinea, Niger, Togo and Chad have integrated the dimensions of climate-smart agriculture at differentiated levels, an evaluation has concluded.

Theparticipatory evaluation was carried out by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

The CSA programming and indicator tool helps to examine the scope of a given program or intervention through the three-dimensional CSA lenses (Productivity/Income, Adaptation/Resilience and Mitigation).

This tool applied to the WAPP showed that the program addressed the three CSA pillars at differentiated levels in each country. The results showed that the WAPP addressed 35-47% of the questions (or outcomes) related to the CSA productivity pillar, 31-35% to adaptation/resilience and 26-32% to mitigation in the five countries.

Other key findings of the assessment are as follows:

• Assessing the level of integration of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in agricultural projects is necessary to optimize interventions for increased resilience of rural communities in West Africa.
• The CSA programming and indicator tool developed by CCAFS in collaboration with USAID's Feed the Future Program is an appropriate method for assessing the integration of CSA into development projects.
• The FAPAO projects in five countries have integrated CSA dimensions at different levels.
• The WAPP is more focused on productivity in each country, as reflected in the project's title.
• Although the WAPP was designed to address the challenges of increasing agricultural productivity, the program's implementation has the potential to take into account the other CSA pillars, such as adaptation/resilience and mitigation.

Capacity building

CORAF has collaborated with three institutions: CCAFS, AGHYMET and ICRAF to support countries under the additional funding of PPAAO 1C in the use of agrometeorological information in the management of their agricultural operations.

CCAFS trained 14 employees to act as trainers. They in turn trained CSA farmers.

ICRAF coordinated the creation of 20 multidisciplinary technical groups responsible for formulating agrometeorological information to be disseminated to farmers, as well as the production of 50 daily weather bulletins, two (02) seasonal forecasts and six (06) weekly bulletins which were broadcast by community radios.

AGRHYMET has developed "eAgriMetelectronic for agriculture and meteorology" for the distribution of agrometeorological information to users via cell phone.

e-AgriMet enables farmers to use their cell phones to (i) send information to the ARC server on the status of the cropping season (soil characteristics and tillage, crop situations, phenology, species/varieties grown, sowing dates and densities, fertilizer supply), nature and extent of damage observed, yields, rainfall and other information about the farm) and (ii) make requests via SMS enabling them to receive specific hydro-agro-climatic and phytosanitary information in real time (seasonal forecasts, climatic risks, pests, agrometeorological advice, etc.).)