Climate Resilience
Zambia
Home to 17 million people, Zambia is a landlocked country in southern Africa with a strong commitment to green development to become a middle-income country within the next decade. Characterized for its dependence on maize, Zambia is in need of agricultural diversification, climate information services and policies to support farmers and others in the food value chain to make agriculture a successful component of the country’s green growth strategy.
Gender and social equity are also recognized among areas that need to be prioritized to enhance systemic resilience. Researchers and partners will work on developing an agricultural risk management strategy that prioritizes gender-differentiated, insurable climatic risks and co-designing bundled insurance products, such as gender-appropriate risk-contingent credit. Targeted financial education, randomized controlled trials, monitoring, and loan repayments will be managed by local partners, providing expertise to continue over the long term. In addition to rolling out its work packages, the Initiative aims to support policy design and mass communication of its work in collaboration with other CGIAR Initiatives.
Here are some key highlights of ClimBeR’s work in Zambia from 2022 to 2024:
- ClimBeR’s bundled climate information services (forecasts and agro-advisories) reached 196,425 farmers in Zambia (49% women) through Munda Makeover.
- ClimBeR established a collaboration with Zambia’s Ministry of Agriculture to scale risk-contingent credit (RCC).
- Seasonal climate risk profiles developed for Kenya, Zambia, and Senegal that were enhanced to cater to country-specific applications and better address the needs of agricultural stakeholders and policymakers.
- ClimBeR increased the capacity of key partners to understand the importance of the climate-conflict nexus in building sustainable resilience. Collaborations with ACCORD and MGEE have been key to raising awareness both at the country level and globally on the climate security nexus through tailored capacity building exercises.
- ClimBeR’s Work Package 2 – Climate Security informed Zambia’s Green Growth Strategy, and contributed to the enactment of this policy through the co-design and implementation of action plans and investments on climate security.
- Integrated Future Estimator for Emissions and Diets (iFEED) modelling influenced discussions on the Zambian 2025 Agricultural National Budget, shaping interventions for climate resilience and Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) targets.
- ClimBeR evidence was used in Zambia’s Comprehensive Agriculture Transformation Support Programme (CATSP) where the Initiative’s Work Package 3 provided supporting evidence on crop productivity, GHG emissions, and nutritional outcomes in support of diversification pathways.
- ClimBeR’s work with the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) in Zambia led to the establishment of the National Drought Action Plan, with drought contingency plans implemented in two pilot districts using the South Asia Drought Monitoring System (SADMS) framework in partnership with the Nexus Gains Initiative and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), with a formal launch planned for 2025.
- The launch of ClimBeR’s ZADMS and the AWARE Platforms in collaboration with partners enabled provincial and district authorities in Zambia to undertake anticipatory action planning and improve community disaster preparedness.
- The CSG Dashboard also supported Zambian stakeholders in understanding and coordinating ongoing programs across sectors. This tool guides resource planning, climate adaptation prioritization, and promotes long-term resilience measures aligned with Zambia’s National Adaptation Plan.
- ClimBeR also supported the development of Zambia’s Farmer Input Support Programme by providing input on the resilience of the value of beans.
Social Equity and Inclusion
Inequality is a powerful determinant of who bears the brunt of a disaster. The poor and marginalized, who often live in more hazard-prone areas with poor infrastructure and lack access to health care and other services, are only further at risk from disasters. In this lens, poverty is both the cause and effect of disaster risk. The lack of income, coping measures, and access only further exacerbates these inequalities over the long term. Disaster risk reduction, therefore, requires engagement across all and multiple levels of society and multistakeholder partnerships. It also needs to integrate social equity and inclusion into intervention measures to ensure that those who are disproportionately affected by disasters are not left behind.
Research interventions, therefore, need to focus on transformative measures that include social equity and inclusion, (Jon Hellin et al 2022, Environ) together with improved coordination across multiple levels, investments in data collection, access to climate information services, and anticipatory action to ensure the longer-term resilience of local communities to the continued effects of climate change and the reduction of disaster risk.
ClimBeR’s LocAlly led Climate adapTation ChampION (ACTION) Grant Program focuses on interventions that are driven and implemented at the local level, with the involvement and leadership of community members, organizations, and local governments. ClimBeR developed a polycentric governance framework, which was analyzed and evaluated in conjunction with local communities. Co-creating the solution was a participatory process that involved putting this framework into practice by involving multiple stakeholders, from the local government to community organizations, who were then selected to set up the borehole. This also ensured that the benefits of this intervention were equitable and benefited women and men in the community alike by creating both nutrition and economic benefits and also reducing the amount of time and distances that women often walked to access water before this.
Climate Finance
ClimBeR developed and tested a range of innovative microfinance mechanisms that combine credit, insurance, and savings. In 2022, ClimBeR collaborated with Financial Access, Agora Microfinance (Zambia) and ECLOF (Kenya) to develop climate-smart credit scoring tools designed for SMEs and microfinance institutions to give smallholder farmers access to finance. The Initiative also worked to support capacity building of financial literacy on insurance, credit and savings through the Munda Makeover TV show in Zambia.
Partnerships
The partnership with the Zambia Ministry of Agriculture led to the development and operationalization of the Zambia Drought Management System, enhancing the country’s drought response capacities. In addition, collaboration with the Ministry of Green Economy informed the Zambia National Green Growth Strategy (2024–2030) by providing evidence to support social cohesion, peace, and stability in the pursuit of sustainable economic growth.
ClimBeR has also worked with various CGIAR Initiatives and bilaterial projects in Zambia, demonstrating what the CGIAR research portfolio’s integration strategy looks like in practice. These collaborations have helped align activities with complementary research areas, foster synergies, and enhance coordination to maximize CGIAR’s impact while ensuring efficient resource use and minimizing duplication.
ClimBeR has extended climate resilience agro-advisories and nutrition advice in Zambia through collaborations with AICCRA, AVENIR, AgriLAC Resiliente, Ukama Ustawi, and Livestock and Climate.
ClimBeR also collaborated with the “Promoting Resilience and Food Security through Risk-Contingent Credit in Africa” project, funded by BMZ, to expand access to risk-contingent credit for farmers in Zambia.
In collaboration with AICCRA, ClimBeR supported the operationalization of the Zambia Drought Management System with the country’s Ministry of Agriculture.
2025 and beyond….
In Zambia, ClimBeR innovations played a key role in shaping policy action. In 2024, ClimBeR contributed to the enactment of Zambia’s Green Growth Strategy through the co-design and implementation of action plans and climate security investments. The Ministry of Agriculture adopted the Zambia Drought Management System (ZADMS) and AWARE to manage drought risks, enabling provincial and district authorities to improve anticipatory action planning and community disaster preparedness. The integrated Future Estimator for Emissions and Diets (iFEED) model’s evidence on nutrition security and climate extremes informed discussions on the 2025 Agricultural National Budget, shaping climate resilience interventions aligned with the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP) targets. ClimBeR’s Climate Smart Governance (CSG) Dashboard supported stakeholders in coordinating programs across sectors, guiding resource planning, climate adaptation prioritization, and long-term resilience measures aligned with Zambia’s National Adaptation Plan.
Building on a series of national engagements from 2022 to 2024, the Initiative now has a diverse portfolio of partners, including ministries, national and regional agencies, farmer organizations, and NGOs, that signal its legacy in building sustainable long-term resilience that is locally led.
Read about the Initiative’s work in other target countries: