About Us
Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) works with national and regional partners across Africa to provide access to—and enable the use of—enhanced climate information services and validated technologies and practices for climate-smart agriculture for millions of smallholder farmers across the continent. Through our innovative partnerships, CGIAR-led innovations are being delivered on the scale that meets the climate crisis.
With better access to innovative technology and advisory services—linked to information about effective response measures—farmers are enabled to better anticipate climate events and take preventative action that helps their communities safeguard livelihoods and the environment.
AICCRA has teams in six countries: Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia, and a number of regional initiatives that complement national activities to deliver benefits for a broader range of stakeholders across West Africa and East and Southern Africa. AICCRA teams also focus on four themes: Knowledge, partnerships, innovation and gender and social inclusion.
AICCRA has reached seven million farmers with such innovations from 2021 to 2023, building on more than five decades of innovation led by CGIAR - the world’s largest publicly funded research partnerships for agriculture and food security.
What is CGIAR?
CGIAR is a global research partnership for a food-secure future dedicated to transforming food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis. Read more.
AICCRA is spearheading a new approach for CGIAR, focusing largely on scaling proven innovations developed by CGIAR and its partners. Moreover, CGIAR researchers supported by AICCRA are seeking answers to fundamental questions of the economic, social and institutional contexts in which innovation can flourish in Africa. AICCRA partners aim to discover how innovation can be packaged (or 'bundled') with complementary actions and policies, which together deliver impact beyond the sum-of-the-parts of any one innovation alone, offer transformative opportunities to smallholder farmers in Africa. Read AICCRA's vision for scaling.
AICCRA is led by the Alliance Bioversity International - CIAT, a CGIAR research center, and is supported by a grant from the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank Group, which is the part of the bank that assists the world’s poorest countries. This IDA grant is used to enhance research and capacity-building activities led by CGIAR and national or regional African partners in IDA eligible countries in Africa. A full list of participating CGIAR research centers and project partners can be found here.
At the UN COP28 climate change summit in Dubai in December 2023, The World Bank announced the intention to commit USD 100 million to continue the work of AICCRA in the years ahead. A March 2024 World Bank Board meeting approved the first tranche of finance against that commitment for 2024-2025, with preparations for a second tranche to cover the period 2026-2029 expected to begin soon.
AICCRA builds on the legacy of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), a CGIAR Research Program which operated on a global scale for more than a decade, coming to its conclusion in 2021 under the 'OneCGIAR' transformation.