The World Bank Board of Directors has approved a US$60 million International Development Association (IDA) grant to help African countries strengthen the resilience of their agricultural sectors to the threat posed by climate change.

The grant fulfills the World Bank’s commitment at the 2019 United Nations Climate Summit to increase its support to the CGIAR, a global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security, to help advance agricultural research efforts for the benefit of rural households that rely on agriculture as a major livelihood source, and to increase food security.

Through the new operation –Accelerating the Impact of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa project, AICCRA—the World Bank will support research and capacity-building activities carried out by the CGIAR centres and partner organizations, with the goal of enhancing access to climate information services and validated climate-smart agriculture technologies in Africa.

By gaining better access to climate advisories linked to information about effective response measures, farmers and livestock keepers will be able to better anticipate climate-related events and take preventative actions that can help to safeguard productive activities and avoid catastrophic losses.

Mobilizing science and innovation for the benefit of agricultural development is consistent with the commitments made during the Africa Food Security Leadership Dialogue (AFSLD), a multi-partner initiative formed in 2019 to deal with the problem of hunger and vulnerability to climate change on the African continent.

The new project responds to the AFSLD call for joint action against hunger in the face of climate change, at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has further increased the vulnerability of millions of households.

AICCRA activities will be concentrated in six countries —Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Zambia— but its benefits will be realized region-wide: “Knowledge generation and technology transfer are deserving of IDA regional support because the benefits flow across national boundaries and therefore are unlikely to be supported adequately by individual governments acting alone,” says Ms. Deborah Wetzel, World Bank Director of Regional Integration for Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Northern Africa.

“CGIAR plays a unique catalytic role in strengthening global, regional and local capacity to combat the effects of climate change, in Africa and throughout the world”.

AICCRA will be administered by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, the lead centre for the CGIAR Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS).

AICCRA will focus on bridging the gap between the organizations that generate and make available climate knowledge and CSA technologies and the organizations and individuals that take up, retransmit, or otherwise make use of the climate knowledge and CSA technologies, for the purpose of enhancing the resilience of Africa’s agriculture and food systems in the face of climate change. Through support to CCAFS, AICCRA will strengthen the technical, institutional, and human capacity needed to move CGIAR innovations off the shelf, so that with the help of other partners they can achieve impacts at scale in IDA-eligible countries in Africa.

The new project will also strengthen systemic capacity to monitor climate change in Africa, project the likely impacts of climate change on local agri-food systems, identify improved technologies that can strengthen the resilience of those systems in the face of climate change, and transfer knowledge about the improved technologies to agri-food system actors. The knowledge, technologies, and decision making tools promoted under AICCRA will be of value not only to productive agents (e.g., farmers, livestock keepers, assemblers, processors, and distributors), but also to the public, private, and civil society organizations that play critical roles in delivering improved technologies to productive agents.