CFPs: Innovative regenerative Agriculture approaches to improve Resilience and Food Security

The grant will finance the implementation of a project on “Innovative regenerative agriculture approaches to improve resilience and food security”.

Project Goal and Objectives

• Goal: Contribute to more productive and nutritious climate resilient and sustainable agricultural production through the application of regenerative agriculture techniques aimed at improve soil health and natural resource management (NRM), while enhancing climate change mitigation in the three selected countries and projects.
• Objective 1: Create a data infrastructure able to support soil monitoring and evidence-based decision making at a national scale.
• Objective 2: Improve resilience and food security of smallholder crop producers by enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of soil and water resources use through the introduction of regenerative agriculture techniques aimed at improving food quality, agricultural productivity and at enhancing climate change mitigation.
• Objective 3: Foster the coordination between project countries through knowledge and technology exchanges a la SSTC manner, workshops, and other activities to disseminate results, best practices, and to replicate and scale up tested and documented innovations.

Priority Area

• PA1: Increased ambition on mainstreaming and other priority issues, and enhanced targeting of the most vulnerable rural people
• PA2: Strategic focus on fragility, conflict and building resilience
• PA3: Strategic partnerships to enhance impacts
• PA4: Enhancing performance and efficiency

Grant Theme

• Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of these days and it is having a huge impact on agriculture through a multitude of channels, including soil degradation and water scarcity. Smallholder farmers from developing countries, that constitute IFAD’s target population, are dramatically affected by these phenomena. Moreover, soil health is the basis of food production, therefore soil degradation is strongly connected with food insecurity. Soil data can unlock key information to transition to a more efficient and sustainable system. To address these issues, one possible channel is regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture describes farming and grazing practices that, among other benefits, reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity – resulting in both carbon drawdown and improving the water cycle. Combining these practices with cutting-edge technologies to assess soil health and agricultural inputs needs would improve farmers’ use of land and of resources. The grant would fund two interconnected interventions:
  • One or more pilot studies, which aim at introducing in small farmers communities cutting-edge technologies for pumping water and soil monitoring, to improve soil health and avoid resource wasting.
  • Systematic data collection to improve and monitor soil health and predict extreme events (droughts, floods, etch.), using a combination of remote-sensing data and irrigation sensors. This would help to build predicting models to improve precision targeting at project design and inform early warning systems.

Funding Information

• The overall grant envelope is 500,000 USD. The recipient’s contribution must be at least 25% for private sector applicants, reaching a total grant value of 625,000 USD. For other applicants, it is recommended that the recipient’s contribution is at least 20% (total grant value 600,000 USD).

Expected Outcomes

• Creation of a permanent data infrastructure containing information to monitor soil-health;
• Evidence of improved food security due to improved quality of the produce;
• Evidence of lower agricultural production costs due to RA techniques;
• Improved natural resource management;
• Evidence of reduction of GHG emission and of soil regeneration through climate-change mitigation practices;
• Evidence on the impact of regenerative agriculture techniques on agricultural productivity and food/produce quality to contribute to policy dialogue.

Target group

• The grant will reach the IFAD defined project beneficiaries. Smallholder rural households will benefit from the access to advanced RA technologies and practices in combination with technical assistance and training to support agricultural production, enhancing soil regeneration, crop yield and food quality. National governments will directly benefit from the creation of a permanent data infrastructure containing information on soil quality and distribution of arable land, that will be a valuable tool to improve targeting and evidence-based decision making. Governments will also benefit from the creation of a strong international community of practice, fostering cooperation and knowledge sharing after the project completion. There will be spill-over effects positively affecting the rural communities in terms of improved soil health, increased quality of crop produce/food, and know-how. Local stakeholders will benefit as indirect beneficiaries from the knowledge disseminated by the grant and the built partnership between participant countries.
• Direct beneficiaries:
  • Beneficiaries of the selected project/s
  • National governments
• Indirect beneficiaries:
  • Spillover effects for communities
  • Local stakeholders

Target Regions and Countries

• The scope of the grant is global/regional. In particular, NEN has already identified three suitable countries in which the interventions foreseen for the present grant would be particularly effective, namely Egypt, Moldova and Yemen. Indeed, the proposal should build on three existing projects: The Sustainable Transformation for Agricultural Resilience in Upper (STAR, Egypt), the Talent Retention for Rural Transformation Project (TRTP, Moldova) and the Rural Livelihood Development Project (RLDP, Yemen). All the three projects have components and activities related to agricultural development and innovation that can be complemented by introducing regenerative agriculture practices aimed at enhancing natural resource management and preserving soil health.

For more information, visit IFAD.