Kenyan Smallholder Farmers to Benefit from GEF’s Financing in Africa

Kenya is among the countries set to benefit from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) which will be financing a total of US$116 million in a program to promote long-term sustainability and production-system resilience among smallholder farmers in Africa.

Other countries to also benefit from the Integrated Approach Programme on Fostering Sustainability and Resilience for Food Security in sub-Saharan Africa, which aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including Burkina Faso, Burundi, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Swaziland, Tanzania, and Uganda.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) will lead the Programme, with the Programme Coordination Unit hosted by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) of the CGIAR System Organization.

More specifically, the Programme aims to support national policies and farmer practices that safeguard food production and frameworks for cooperation across the agricultural and environmental sectors. It seeks to foster sustainability and food security resilience by strengthening institutions, scaling up of integrated approaches for food security, and monitoring and assessing global environmental benefits.

The Programme targets almost three million households in the 12 countries, and will: improve the management of 10 million hectares of land; focus on gender issues to address policy and culturally-related barriers to gender equity and women’s empowerment; and mitigate 10-20 million metric tons of carbon.

The Programme will engage the private sector to develop viable value chains for food crops.

It will also include a regional hub to improve access to knowledge from scientific institutions and help inform policy and investment opportunities for managing ecosystem services in smallholder agriculture.

Overall, the Programme aims to support farmers as they experiment with innovative tools tailored to their own contexts and help them to share their experiences.