Senegal is turning farm adaptation plans into projects ready to seek climate finance. Two priority projects are now ready to seek climate finance, and more than 1,200 farmers are already using climate-resilient methods, FAO reported on 18 September.
The projects grew out of Senegal’s Agriculture National Adaptation Plan, developed with support from FAO’s SAGA 2 project. One focuses on managing land and water in Casamance and the groundnut basin. The other helps vulnerable farmers manage climate risks and adopt more resilient practices.
Learning from the field
What farmers learn on the ground, working with researchers and universities, is being fed back into national plans and investment decisions.
Money is the next hurdle. Under the SCALA programme, FAO has helped set up a partnership between women’s producer groups, the National Federation for Organic Agriculture (FENAB) and La Banque Agricole to make it easier to borrow for agroecological farming. The FAO update did not specify a lending total.
The update was part of FAO’s review marking ten years of the Initiative for the Adaptation of African Agriculture, launched by Morocco ahead of COP22 in 2016. The lesson from Senegal, FAO says, is that plans only matter once they reach the fields.
Related reporting: Ethiopia studies three watersheds to decide where climate money should go.
