Many countries across East Africa are experiencing rising temperatures, unpredictable rainfall patterns, and an increasing number of extreme weather events such as floods and prolonged droughts. Climate change is having far-reaching consequences for the agricultural sector and the management of natural resources and the food security situation for the growing urban and rural population. Adoption of climate smart and ecologically sustainable production methods is key to improving productivity of the existing food crop production and supply systems.

CRAFT’s overall goal is to contribute to the increased availability of accessible and climate resilient food for the growing population in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

The project is implementing the following activities:

• Climate risk analysis of targeted value chains and identification of business opportunities that address climate change in agriculture.
• Business case development and co-investment through the climate innovation and investment facility with private sector, SMEs, and farmer cooperatives.
• Levering investments by facilitating access to finance in collaboration with financial institutions;
• Policy influencing and operationalisation of climate plans.
• Feedback of practical applicability of climate smart practices, technologies, models and climate services.

Gender equality and social inclusion, and Knowledge sharing and learning are cross-cutting elements of the project. Practices, technologies, approaches, and methodologies that have proven to be successful will be shared and scaled to increase their impact. Gender equality and opportunities for youth employment will be integrated in the project’s implementation.

The primary target groups of the project include small and medium entrepreneurial farmers, SME agribusinesses, and service providers to these SMEs, as well as financial institutions and government agencies that play a key role in creating an enabling environment that can foster large-scale roll-out of climate smart agriculture in East Africa.

Objectives:

• Increasing the adoption of climate smart practices and technologies amongst farmers and agro-enterprises.
• Increasing investments and business growth in climate smart value chains.
• Increasing investments and business growth in climate smart value chains.
• Creating the enabling environment necessary to ensure large-scale roll out of market driven climate smart agriculture.

Our targeted results:

• 248,000 Smallholder farmers trained in climate smart agriculture practices and technologies.
• 131,000 Smallholder farmers experienced an increase in their incomes.
• 56 Agribusinesses accessed matching grants for the implementation of climate change adaptation practices and technologies.
• 1,600 People employed by project validated SMEs, farmers groups and cooperatives.

Key themes:

• Project Sustainability.
• Gender inclusivity.
• Climate- Smart Agriculture resilience.
• Business perfomance.
• CSA products, and technologies adoption.