Strengthening Climate Resilience of Ethiopia’s Smallholder Farmers: Bundled Climate-Smart Solutions for Agricultural Commercialization Clusters (ACCs)

To boost Ethiopia’s agricultural sector, the government launched the Agricultural Commercialization Cluster (ACC) initiative in 2019. This initiative aims to raise farmers’ incomes, expand market opportunities, enhance agro-processing, increase product volumes, and create more jobs. Smallholder farmers, however, face major challenges due to climate change. Unpredictable rainfall, frequent droughts and extreme weather events are causing crop failures, reducing incomes, and threatening the livelihoods of smallholder farmers, leading to increased food insecurity.

To build resilience against climate variability, it is essential to integrate bundled climate-smart agricultural solutions across the ACC. In response, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and the Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI), have been developing tailored climate-smart solutions for the maize value-chain across the ACC. This effort is part of the Ukama Ustawi (UU) Initiative,  aimed at addressing the specific challenges faced by smallholder farmers.  It is within this context that, on October 14, 2024, the Alliance, ATI and Lersha jointly organized a progress update workshop for the de-risking smallholder farmers from climate-induced risks across the ACC using bundled climate-smart agricultural solutions initiative. The event presented the latest findings on climate risk and climate-smart agriculture solutions to manage risks across the maize value chain in four ACC pilot zones, and a climate-smart credit scoring tool.

Dr. Sintayehu Alemayehu – Scientist and Research Team Leader at the Alliance – opened the workshop. He outlined the workshop’s objectives and highlighted the critical need for developing context-specific climate-smart solutions to help smallholder farmers in Agricultural Commercialization Clusters (ACC) to build resilience against climate variability.