OREANDA-NEWS. December 01, 2015. Situation: Malawi, like many Southern African countries, is experiencing increasing climate variability which results in poor crop yields or failures due to drought and floods. Certain districts across the country are experiencing changing rainfall patterns and higher temperatures that have shortened the growing season. Rainfall occurs from November to May and varies across the country—from less than 600 mm in the southern region to over 1,800 mm in the highlands. Frequent droughts and floods are eroding assets and knowledge, leaving people more vulnerable to disaster. An upsurge in malaria and cholera due to climate change requires smallholder farmers to spend more time caring for the sick and less time working in their fields.

Objective: Since 2012, AfDB in partnership with the Global Environmental Facility, has been working to improve resilience to current climate variability and future climate change by developing and implementing adaptation strategies and measures that will improve agricultural production and rural livelihoods for some 300,000 residents in the initial three target districts—Karonga, Dedza, and Chikwawa. It is also working to enhance national and district agency capacities to support community-based adaptation to climate change.

Unique Project Feature: This project was the first to address climate change adaptation in Malawi’s agricultural sector.

Lessons learned: Valuable lessons have been learned from the project:

Institutional arrangements are of utmost importance. The project initially suffered because it was directly overseen by an institution that lacked agricultural knowledge and capacity. This could have been mitigated if there had been closer coordination between agencies with proper subject matter expertise in both climate change adaptation and agriculture.

Designation of project implementation unit is important. During the project, an independent project implementation unit was much more effective than its government counterpart, considering the fact that the latter did not have sufficient skills or human resources to disburse funding in a timely manner. Having the right administrative arrangements in place may therefore save a lot of time during implementation. 

Ensure sustainability. Development assistance is limited and it is a significant challenge to overcome the perception of ongoing project support. To prevent dependency, projects should emphasize that support is temporary, even if the challenges may increase in severity. Projects should stimulate beneficiaries to internalize new skills and training to become autonomous. Training programs should therefore be innovative, interactive, and constructed in a way that encourages autonomy and pro-active agency.

Use integrated strategies to maximize adaptation benefits. Project personnel should not implement even successful activities as standalone initiatives. Integration among activities maximizes adaptation benefits. More thought should therefore go into which portfolio of activities, at individual and community levels, optimizes risks and rewards.

Broaden dialogue across sectors. As a mitigating measure, instituting broader dialogue can potentially safeguard against risks that come with implementing the interventions of any project that may have been relatively low historically, but that may increase with climate change. For example, in the case of establishing fish ponds, more thought needs to go into which fish species are appropriate for farming given the risk of extreme flooding, or how the fish ponds, in combination with more frequently-occurring extreme weather, will alter the malaria dynamic in communities.

Time is of the essence. With respect to adaptation efforts, the window of opportunity is narrow. For example, if trees planted along a river bank to reduce erosion during times of floods are not given ample time to take root ahead of the next severe weather occurrence, such intervention will not be successful.