In Senegal, AICCRA supports partnership development, co-innovation and climate advisory services to scale innovations in climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and climate information services (CIS) value chains.

The team's partnerships build on existing scientific and educational networks in Senegal and across West Africa. Through these partnerships, AICCRA is enhancing the capacity of public institutions and private enterprise to deliver climate information services and climate-smart agriculture knowledge along value chains vital to the Senegalese economy. 

To sustainably support climate information services and climate-smart agriculture beyond the scope of the project, AICCRA-Senegal is helping to train agricultural researchers and extension workers, while establishing 'AgriTech' innovation platforms. 

Highlights

Building vibrant national partnerships for scaling and impact

With AICCRA Senegal, five key implementing institutions, ANACIM (meteorological service), ISRA-CERAAS (research), Jokalante (agritech), ANCAR (extension system) and URAC (media) have worked together for the first time to develop integrated climate information services and climate-smart agriculture technologies and processes.

Linking with their activity portfolios, these partners have boosted farmers’ actions towards resilience:

• Under the leadership of ISRA-CERAAS, 65 farmers have been trained on good agronomic practices for selected crops, 5 technology parks were established to promote adapted improved varieties and dairy production, 100+ demonstration plots were installed in 18 villages to showcase pearl millet and groundnut cultivars under integrated soil fertility management (ISFM) approach.
• In collaboration with ANCAR, 5 field schools, 5 showcase plots and 24 demonstration plots were installed. 297 producers including 207 women (70%) and 21 actors (next users and authorities) participated in the farmers' field days.
• AICCRA facilitated weekly consultations where ANACIM, ISRA-CERAAS and private agri-tech company Jokalante generated agro-advisories based primarily on iSAT. Jokalante provided additional pathways for creating and distributing context-specific advisories to farmers and key value chain players adjusted for language, literacy, demographic, and gender in 3 districts (Méouane, Daga Birame and Thiel).
• Through URAC, climate information reached more than 274,677 listeners (136,773 women) via 92 radio programs focused on allowing farmers to make better informed decisions on the use of fertilizer, planting and other farming-related activities. In a recent survey, 76% of the population reached (equally distributed men and women) have found the programs very useful.

Strengthening ANACIM's capacity to provide highly accurate climate data and to facilitate access to this information for its users

With AICCRA’s support, Senegal’s national meteorological service, ANACIM, has extended its merged gridded data, installed the Automatic Weather Station Data Tool (ADT), prototyped soil water balance tools, and trained staff in the most recent PyCPT version for seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasting. These capabilities will be further expanded in 2023.

Under AICCRA Senegal, ILRI worked closely with ANACIM and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) to support the design and initial development of the AgDataHub, and to link it with existing ANACIM climate and weather data and Maproom tools. IRI work under this activity focused on agricultural extension and advisory service (EAS) capacity strengthening, and curriculum and digital platform development.

Identifying suitable climate-smart options for cereals, legumes, livestock value chains to be integrated into tailored agro-advisory systems for Senegalese smallholder farmers

Building on the expertise of ICRISAT, AICCRA and partners are integrating multi-dimensional knowledge and climate information to develop tailored climate-informed agro-advisory systems for specific value chains.

By validating existing infrastructure and using downscaled climate data (with ANACIM), the whole farm household base model will be able to run a scenario analysis to identify the most profitable and resilient options considering climate, market, labour, and farmer preferences.

Supporting the development and strengthening of agribusinesses and business models for scaling climate-smart agriculture in a gender-focused approach

The AICCRA Senegal Gender Smart Accelerator Challenge seeks to support SMEs with a gender-smart focus (for example, being women-led or with a strong gender inclusion plan) to scale the integration of climate solutions by promoting gender-smart investments in partnership with national, regional and the private sector actors.

Following an open call, 20 entrepreneurs (17 women, 3 men) were selected out of 250 applicants to participate in the capacity building program including modules on business development, investment readiness, CSA practices and climate information services. In mid-February, the program closed in Dakar during innovation presentation days in front of a jury composed of public and private investors with grants of up to USD 25 000.

The 2022/23 Accelerator program produced two major outcomes:

• The 20 finalists of the activity (representing 250 employees and 7,500 smallholder farmers cumulatively) are better equipped to access to capital and resources necessary to sustainably scale their climate-smart businesses
• Building awareness in the local financial ecosystem on the importance of de-risking agricultural investments by adopting CSA and resilient practices. By engaging with local financial actors, through seminars, panel discussions in industry forums, AICCRA was able to emphasize on the use of science-based tools to provide more detailed risk and impact assessment, enhancing the transparency of potential agri-food investments to potentially influence more capital allocation to the agricultural sector by private investors.

AICCRA Senegal is led by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in collaboration with:

• The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT
• Agence Nationale de Conseil Agricole et Rural (ANCAR)
• International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)

Further Reading

• AICCRA Brief: Building resilient crop-livestock farming systems in Senegal
• AICCRA InfoNote: Catalyzing the use of climate information in agriculture decision making through datahubs
• AICCRA Brief: iSAT, the new generation digital agro advisory tool that empowers farmers to manage climate risks
• Note: AICCRA-Senegal Gender-Smart Accelerator Grant
• Other publications for AICCRA Senegal