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.
"Thanks to AICCRA, we now have the possibility to get information on rainfall, duration of the rainy season, and the right seeds to use in case of abundant or scarce rainfall. And this is effortless because the information reaches us directly on our mobile phones."
Aissatou Ndimbrane, farmer in Daga-Birame, Senegal
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:
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.
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.
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:
"During the rainy season, we used to have huge difficulties with water, insects and even rodents during the harvest period. But since we started receiving climate information, we are able to anticipate all these thanks to advisories provided by AICCRA project partners."
- Mor Talla Cissé, farmer in Daga-Birame, Senegal
To learn more about AICCRA Senegal's activities, please contact:
Nadine Worou, Senegal Coordinator - N.Worou@cgiar.org
Lamine Diedhiou, Communications Specialist - L.Diedhiou@cgiar.org