The Global Center on Adaptation to Help Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia Adapt to Climate Risk and Enhance Food Security – African Business

The Global Center on Adaptation (GCA).www.GCA.org) today announced that it is providing technical advisory support to a new World Bank’s investment project in Ethiopia. The project valued at $600 million aims to increase the resilience of Ethiopia’s food systems and its preparedness for food insecurity.

Smallholder farmers in Ethiopia are now suffering from increased variability and extreme weather events, decreased rainfall, and higher temperatures due to climate change. This is in a country that 85 percent of farmers rely on rain-fed agriculture. Ethiopia is currently experiencing one of the worst droughts in 50 years. This follows 12-18 months of erratic, failed rains that have dried up many water resources. The war in Ukraine and subsequent rising wheat, fuel and fertilizer costs are also worsening the country’s food crisis.

GCA contributes to climate adaptation in the execution of the project through the following activities:

• In 14 priority value chain sub-sectors of the crop/livestock sector, assess the climatic risk to smallholders
• Find digital adaptation tools to address these risks, and evaluate the opportunities and constraints for their deployment in your country

It is expected that the project would result in 2.4 Million farmers adopting resilience enhancing technologies and practices; 15% less food insecure people within program-targeted areas; 20% increase on cereals and pulses yields in households directly benefiting from the project, and a 25% rise in the volume of agricultural products sold to domestic and regional markets.

Patrick Verkooijen, CEO, Global Center on Adaptation said: “Technology is rapidly changing the way food is produced, transformed, and distributed. In addition to assessing the climatic risks that smallholders face, GCA’s support to the project explores the opportunity to address these risks by deploying digital tools to provide solutions much needed by smallholders and, serve as a potential game changer in the quest for climate resilience and enhanced food security in Ethiopia. The partnership with the World Bank through this project is therefore very much welcome”

Elliot Mghenyi, the Task Manager of the Project in Ethiopia said “We look forward to options to deploy digital solutions to promote climate adaptation for rural households engaged in various agricultural value chains in Ethiopia.”

Distributed by APO Group on the behalf of Global Center on Adaptation.

For interviews and additional information:
Alex Gee
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Chinedu Moghalu
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About the Global Center on Adaptation
The Global Center on Adaptation is an international organization that acts as a solution broker to accelerate action and support adaptation solutions from the international to local levels. It works in partnership with both the public and private sectors. GCA was founded in 2018 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Its headquarters is located in the largest floating office anywhere in the world. GCA has a worldwide network of regional offices in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire; Dhaka, Bangladesh and Beijing, China.