Scientists from across the CGIAR research partnership have developed a multitude of resources for climate-smart agriculture. These include—but certainly not limited to—case studies, training guides, articles and videos. 

These are used by academics, researchers, technicians to help farmers around the world cope with climate change.

These resources cover a variety of themes, target different users and focusing on specific project phases. For instance, you might need more resources about climate information services, or the options available in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from farming. You could be curious how to scale projects that delivered promising results in trial phases. 

The AICCRA Learning Zone helps users select from a curated list of these resources, helping you find the one that's right for your needs.

By using a step-by-step filters, users can easily select the resource most suited to your objectives, needs and capacities.

AICCRA teams collaborated to curate this tailored selection of readily available resources that meet the needs of AICCRA partners based in our focus countries of Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia. They can also support decision making done by AICCRA partners engaged as part of our broader regional work from across West and East and Southern Africa. 

To make the learning zone an efficient and convenient experience, the resources are clearly described and easily accessible in a single location, a 'one-stop-shop' as it were. 

A variety of additional supporting materials are accessible from each resource. 

Finally, descriptions of the resources include keywords and characteristics that help users quickly review if they are relevant. For instance, it could mention timeframes, the types of inputs needed or expected outputs. 

Explore the AICCRA Learning Zone today!

How can you best find the right tool?

Imagine you are a technical officer within a Ministry of Agriculture and you want to design a program that involves climate-smart agriculture.

How should you decide whom to target with your activities?

By selecting “Targeting/Need assessment” under the Thematic area, “Technical staff” under Target User, and “Design” under Project phase, you’ll be presented with five extremely relevant resources for assisting you in making decisions about targeting:

• Climate Change and Food Security Vulnerability Assessment Toolkit
• Climate-Smart Agriculture Rapid Appraisal (CSA-RA) tool
• Rapid Household Multi-Indicator Survey (RHoMIS)
• Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA)
• Local Technical Agroclimatic Committees (LTACs)

You may have been able to find each of these by running an internet search with key terms, but the AICCRA Learning Zone brings them all to your fingertips in a few clicks of the mouse.

Now imagine that you are a researcher interested in implementing gender-sensitive climate-smart options. Make the appropriate selections in the left-hand column, and you are presented with a long list of tools, the top two of which are rated important, the next one as useful, and the rest as optional. This ranking system helps you know which are most relevant to you and saves you time in your background research.

Tell us what you think of the resources

The AICCRA learning zone is free to use and provides a convenient access point to years of research and outputs. Users can also make suggestions of other resources to add to the tool through an upload button on the webpage. This allows for new resources to be added as they are made available.

The learning zone administration team encourage different types of users to provide feedback and suggestions for improvements. Please send your comments to MARLOSupport@cgiar.org.

The team would also be delighted to explore with academic institutions how this learning zone can be integrated into agriculture and climate change curricula.

Check out the AICCRA Learning Zone

Authors

Laura Cramer, AICCRA Thematic Leader

Lili Szilagyi, AICCRA Communications Specialist