Adapting agriculture to climate change remains a crucial issue for food security in West Africa, particularly in the face of the new variant of COVID-19. Following the second call for proposals launched in June 2020 by Expertise France under ECOWAS in the framework of the GCCA+ West Africa project funded by the European Union, two Ghanaian Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) pilot projects have been selected for the first time together with 9 other regional pilot projects for implementation, beginning 2021 for a duration of 20 months.

In all, the 11 new projects selected in December last year under the second call for proposals cover Cabo Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. A total budget of €2.4 million has been earmarked for the implementation of the various project.

West African agriculture is struggling to access resources to invest in sustainable production capacities and in the scaling up of proven technical solutions to address climate change. Already facing structural challenges such as degradation of soil fertility, regional agriculture is confronted with dual phenomenon of climate variability and climate change that affect agricultural performances, supply stability, increasing of occurrence of climate risks and consequently income as well as food and nutritional security.

Friends of the Earth, Ghana and A Rocha Ghana are the two Ghanaian project owners whose pilot project has been selected for implementation. A Rocha Ghana’s project covers ensuring climate change resilience and mitigation by training self-reliant smallholder farmers in the Lake Bosumtwe landscape to be financed with €214,991 (including €190,000 from the GCCA+ WA project) whilst Friends of the Earth, Ghana entails agroforestry technical innovations to fight climate change and improve the productivity of subsistence farmers in the northern region of Ghana to be financed with € 266,718 (including €225,000 from GCCA+ WA project).

The objective of the selected pilot projects is to finance the implementation and capitalization of local innovative solutions with high potential for replication and/or scaling up for the West African region focusing on adapting to the impacts of climate change (seed selection, climate services, agroecological practices, early warning systems) and mitigating of GHG emissions (carbon storage, dewatering by solar pumping, renewable energy in processing units, etc.).

A first call for proposals launched in 2019 resulted in the selection of four projects to be implemented over a 24-month period in Benin, Niger, Mauritania and Chad.

About GCCA+ West Africa Project

As a regional variation of the intra-ACP program, the Global Climate Change Alliance Plus (GCCA+) West Africa project aims to participate in the West African regional effort to implement the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. To this end, it targets the capacity building of regional institutions in West Africa, but also the emergence of innovative field solutions to strengthen the climate resilience of agricultural and rural actors.

Funded by the European Union with €12.1m, the GCCA+ West Africa (WA) regional project is implemented by Expertise France, under the leadership of the ECOWAS Commission and in partnership with the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS).