Best Practice

This paper aims to provide adaptation and development practitioners with a practical framework for developing Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems that can track the success and failure of adaptation initiatives in the development context.

This document shows a successfully designed climate change strategies and made  innovative and effective contributions to climate change adaptation and mitigation actions designed by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)  together with its partners.

This report shows the purpose of the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP) is to deepen regional integration in  Southern African Development Community (SADC). It provides SADC Member States with a consistent and comprehensive programme of long-term economic and social policies. It also provides the Secretariat and other SADC institutions with a clear view of SADC’s approved economic and social policies and priorities.

The purpose of this document therefore is to develop the ‘results chain’ for the Regional Agricultural Policy (RAP), i.e. to identify and define the policy targets and related indicators for the monitoring and evaluation of implementation of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Regional Agricultural Policy.

Agriculture in the SADC region is the primary source of subsistence, employment and income for 61 percent of the peoples of the region. Despite a diversified natural resource base, overall agricultural growth and productivity have remained low over the past twenty years. The urgent implementation of broad-based programmes to reverse the overall decline in the productivity of the agriculture sector is a central priority in setting SADC Member States on the path of fast economic growth and poverty reduction. The diversity of the region’s farming and livelihood systems presents great challenges to policymakers in formulating sound agriculture development strategies. But, even given this diversity, many countries in the region share similar problems and opportunities. Cooperation in some of these key areas can yield significant benefits – as can greater economic integration by taking advantage of natural comparative advantages.

An important feature of SADC MAPP is the progressive simplification and integration of implementation arrangements and donor funding mechanisms. This is consistent with the Windhoek Declaration (in which SADC governments are encouraged to take strong leadership, and donors exhorted to harmonize and align their assistance through programmatic approach to enhance aid effectiveness and sustainability). This also reflects consistency with global commitment as expressed in the 2005 Paris Declaration. SADC MAPP represents a major shift from the traditional “project financing” (and the consequent fragmented and unsustainable assistance) to modalities which support programmatic approaches. It is anticipated that funding mechanisms will gradually converge towards a common basket-funding mechanism in accordance with satisfactory fiduciary and associated financial procedures and management capacities.

This Working Paper summarizes projected climate change impacts on livestock across Africa, using a combination of literature review and some new results on the projected impacts of climate change on the rangelands of Africa. Findings show that there are many options that can help livestock keepers adapt, but there appear to be no options that are widely applicable which do not have constraints to their adoption. An enabling technical and policy environment will thus be needed to ensure livestock keepers can adapt to climate change and enhance their livelihoods and food security.

This study was coordinated by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) to identify areas that are food insecure and vulnerable to the impacts of future climate change, across the priority regions for the CGIAR centres. The research was undertaken by a team of scientists from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). The study relied on maps: first, of variables that indicate the different aspects of food security (availability, access and utilization), and second, of thresholds of climate change exposure important for agricultural systems. Vulnerability was assessed using a domain approach based upon the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) framework of vulnerability as a function of exposure, sensitivity and coping capacity. Nine domains were identified; for each domain, areas of the tropics were classified by high or low exposure, high or low sensitivity, and high or low coping capacity.

This paper summarizes a coherent framework for climate change adaptation programming,which  includes potential indicators, or indicator categories/types, for tracking and evaluating the success of adaptation support and adaptation interventions.

Future-proofing water, agriculture, and food security in an era of climate uncertainty in India.

Cassava is the second-most important staple food crop after maize in Malawi. The availability of different varieties of cassava allow for both commercial use and household consumption of cassava to hedge against food insecurity. Malawi is prone to drought due to climate change vulnerability, poor agricultural practices and high population growth making cassava, a drought-resistant crop, an attrac- tive option.

This study sets out to answer the question of whether cassava is, indeed, the 21st century crop for smallholders. The focus lies on smallholder production sys- tems in Nkhotakota District on the shores of Lake Malawi and in the rural vicinity of Lilongwe, the capital city. A nexus between the household asset endowments of smallholder farmers and their participation in the value chain was examined to identify root causes of the supply-demand mismatch and to formulate recom- mendations for effective value chain development. A partial value chain analysis has been conducted to account for the participation of smallholders in the value chain. We chose a structural analysis over an economic analysis, as prices are high- ly volatile in the informal markets of Malawi and notoriously difficult to solicit from actors. Since the responsibility for the production of food and cash crops falls broadly along gender lines within a household, gender aspects take a central role in our research. All our instruments included gender differentiated elements.