Kick-off meeting of the Pan-African Regional Program
This meeting will also launch the initial concept of a 'South-South Peer Capacity Exchange' program.
AICCRA speakers at this meeting include Ana Maria Loboguerrero and Marie Ena Derenoncourt.
Languages
English and French
Watch the livestream
Background
Most African citizens depend on subsistence farming for their livelihoods, which has been drastically handicapped by a challenging economy and aggravating climate change.
Although the economy of these countries is diversified, the agriculture sector remains a key economic sector with a significant percentage of value added in the country’s GDP (in average 16% and up to 40% in targeted countries).
Moreover, up to 70% of these countries’ total population relies on subsistence farming. It has been clearly observed that agricultural activity and associated productivity has been declining in Africa over the last decades.
This is substantially due to African nations being hit with a series of climate related droughts and locusts’ invasions more recently.
During the past two decades, African countries have made significant progress in planning climate-resilient and low-greenhouse gas emissions development to address climate related challenges.
As a group of countries and the continent most vulnerable to climate change, noteworthy efforts have been put in place by governments in developing plans, strategic documents, and frameworks, as well as institutional settings, aiming at guiding socio-economic paths towards sustainable development in this age of climate crisis.
As of today, most of the countries’ plans fall short to support the country preparation to manage current global challenges that are climate change and Sustainable Development Goals.
Conflicting urgencies persistently defies the prioritization of the climate change agenda. Most serious, these plans are yet to attract finance and investment at adequate scale, either from domestic or international source, for their implementation.
In consequence, implementation lags behind; carbon efficiency decreases as GHG emissions intensity increases and populations feel the impacts of climate change stronger than ever.
There is limited evidence on the opportunities and barriers to the uptake of climate services by smallholder farmers for resilient agricultural systems in sub-Saharan Africa.
Building a resilient community against the adverse effects of climate change and exploiting the benefits from favorable situations will necessitate the design and implementation of applicable climate risk management strategies which includes availing decision-relevant climate information.
For effective climate risk management, it is important to have reliable information about the past climate, recent trends and swings, likely future trajectories, and related impacts.
Applicable use entails knowledge within the user community of what information is available and how it might be applied.
This should consist of a facilitated conversation between meteorologists and the user community, where the user community is trained to understand, demand, and use climate information, along with training climate scientists to understand the needs of the users.
The Pan-African Regional Program
The Africa Adaptation Initiative (AAI) and the Adaptation of African Agriculture (AAA) to climate change initiative organize in Rabat (October 3-4, 2022) a kick-off event with National Designated Authorities (NDA) representatives of 23 African partner countries, in order to present the overall principles, issues, goals, phases, activities and timeline of the Pan-African Regional Programme.
Following an integrated approach to address the challenges above, the Africa Adaptation Initiative (AAI), in partnership with the Adaptation of African Agriculture (AAA) to climate change initiative will support 23 African countries to initiate a Pan-African Regional Programme building the necessary long-lasting capacity needed to identify, design, and develop transformational climate interventions in agriculture and energy for agriculture sectors. A grant has been raised to this end from the Green Climate Fund benefiting the following countries:
Angola, Benin, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Gabon, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Sudan, Togo, Zambia.
In addition to the NDAs from 23 African countries which are partner of the Pan-African Regional Programme, NDA representatives of eight additional African countries who already developed Climate Smart Agriculture Investment Plans (CSAIP) will also reflect on their experience during the kick-off meeting.
This program aims at supporting the governments of the participating African countries’ efforts to undertake the transition towards low emission and climate resilient development.
It targets agriculture and energy for agriculture sectors that are among the most vulnerable to climate change, drives Greenhouse Gas emissions while supporting economic development.
Envisaged in three phases, the Programme will be focused on achieving the following comprehensive set of objectives:
(i) Provide individual assessment of each of the participating countries level of preparedness to address climate change and inform short, medium and longer terms specific Readiness plan preparation;
(ii) Constitute a pipeline of projects in the agriculture & energy for agriculture sectors;
(iii) Elaborate a funding strategy including target instruments to support the implementation of the pipeline of projects;
(iv) Support resource mobilization efforts for the financing of transformational climate interventions at regional and pan African levels to demonstrate the viability of the approach and inform a modelled approach to effectively attract climate finance at scale.
Ernst & Young GmbH, as the delivery partner and implementing institution of the Pan-African Regional Programme, will define the next steps of the implementation strategy.
The Pan-African Regional Programme will be implemented following a country-driven approach, taking full account of national circumstances and strategic priorities.
It will catalyze opportunities derived from key climate change initiatives launched by African Heads of States and leaders, such as the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), the Africa Adaptation Initiative (AAI) and the Adaptation of African Agriculture (AAA) to climate change initiative.
Participants include the African NDAs, the Green Climate Fund representatives, international development agencies and banks, global initiatives, research centres, and donors.
South-South Peer Capacity Exchange Program
As an organizing partner, the CGIAR is supporting AAI and AAA, through its Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research in Africa (AICCRA) project.
During the event, CGIAR will present a portfolio of research products, tools and methods that can inform implementation of the Pan-African Regional Program and showcase their practical application and impact, through case studies.
Participants’ needs for the Program (science delivery, capacity building) will be identified and matched with the CGIAR research portfolio, through active engagement.
NDA representatives of participating countries will discuss the Pan-African Regional Program from the perspective of their specific situations, the actions already undertaken and their adaptation projects in the agricultural sector and energy for agriculture.
Following the two-days kickoff event, and with the financial support of the European Union (EU) and financial and technical support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Africa Adaption Initiative (AAI) through the project, “Enhancing Knowledge and Evidence to Scale-up Climate Change Adaptation in Africa”, will organize a two-days training from October 5 to 6, 2022 on AAI’s knowledge and capacity for climate change adaptation project development hub and launch an initial concept for the first AAI South-South Peer Capacity Exchange Program (SSEP).
The SSEP will facilitate an exchange of learnings, lessons learnt, best practices, as well as existing and untapped opportunities experienced to enhancing the understanding and capacity of African decision-makers in climate finance in integrating climate risk assessments for bankable project development and climate finance mobilization.
This platform will develop opportunities through which information about successful adaptation interventions, adaptation planning methods, and access to financing sources is gathered and shared, and will create a solid foundation for future scaling up of adaptation effort and development of future direct investment in climate change adaptation for vulnerable sectors in Africa.
The proposed activity will contribute to the operationalization of Outcome 2 of the EU-UNDP-AAI project, “Enhancing Knowledge and Evidence to Scale-up Climate Change Adaptation in Africa”, which aims at enhancing avenues through which information about successful adaptation interventions, adaptation planning and project development methods, and access to financing sources is gathered and shared.
The implementation of the activities proposed under outcome 2 will create a solid foundation for future scaling up of adaptation efforts and development of future direct investments in climate change adaptation for vulnerable sectors in Africa.
These activities will build on existing knowledge-sharing processes developed as part of country National Adaptation Plan processes to establish a hub for sharing best practices under all the flagships and initiate a south-south peer technical capacity exchange focused on sharing and developing adaptation project development skills using hands-on case study-based interactive exercises.
By strengthening these knowledge and capacity sharing mechanisms as well as the coordination activities of the AAI, this outcome will help create the enabling environment for further climate change adaptation project development within the region.