Background

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA), an integrative concept that addresses the objectives of food production and climate change through simultaneous gains in productivity, adaptation/resilience, mitigation measures and equity, has recently gained prominence as a responsive approach to tackle the above challenges. CSA aims to reorient the correct technical, policy and investment conditions required for agriculture to respond to climate change and future food and income demands.

Making agriculture climate-smart and gender-responsive requires robust policy commitments and strong policy coherence to drive the triple-win objectives of CSA – productivity, adaptation/resilience and mitigation – and to enhance the synergies and minimize trade-offs between the different objectives.

Many African countries have implemented policy frameworks to address climate change in agriculture. However, in most cases, their provisions are either inadequate or not implemented to tackle the challenges of gender responsiveness, vulnerability, and increased climate risk to prepare the sector for climate action effectively.

Multi-stakeholder Platforms (MSPs) for CSA are being established in many countries to catalyze collective action on science-policy dialogue, policy alignment, and policy reforms to foster a gender-responsive enabling environment for CSA. The MSPs have been attempting to promote a more holistic and inclusive approach to these challenges through processes that facilitate dialogue among diverse stakeholders for optimal outcomes by leveraging policy, technical and financing support for initiatives that can drive the adoption of CSA through collaborative efforts. However, how the gaps and barriers need to be addressed have not been comprehensively deliberated by all stakeholders across the value chains and among stakeholders, including researchers, policymakers, policy implementers, the private sector, civil society actors, and local communities.

About the event

Convened by AICCRA, Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA), Climate Resilient Agribusiness for Tomorrow (CRAFT) East Africa, Kenya Agriculture –Climate Multi-Stakeholder Platform and Centre for Coordination of Agricultural Research and Development for Southern Africa (CCARDESA), the main objective of the science-policy dialogue workshop is to provide a forum for sharing evidence and innovations among relevant stakeholders towards influencing gender-responsive policy implementation and reforms with a specific focus on CSA. The prioritized actions will be presented to relevant policy-level decision-makers for consideration. Specific objectives include to:

• Review and validate identified policy gaps and barriers in the enabling environment for implementing and adopting CSA with a gender-responsive and socially inclusive lens.
• Facilitate dialogue between researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and local communities on solutions for identified policy gaps and barriers
• Propose priority interventions for addressing and/or engendering/ justifying the policy gaps and barriers