World Food Program Executive Director visits the Pemba ‘Rural Resilience Initiative’ farmer’s clubs project

Ertharin Cousin, the World Food Program Executive Director, visited the Farmers Club Project in Pemba district, Southern Province on 16 January, 2016. In the Rural Resilience Initiative, DAPP in cooperation with WFP, will work with 2,700 small scale farmers in agricultural extension training to overcome effects of climate change, improve livelihood and income, through community oriented and market-based approaches. The initiative uses Farmers’ Clubs program to respond to climate change and other factors in enhancing food insecurity. Initially, 500 small scale farmers were trained to increase food security and adapt their crop production to fit the local climate. This year the project scales up to reach 2700 farmers.

The yields of farmers in Pemba are low and the increasing frequency of climatic shocks is overwhelming beyond their coping capacities. Therefore, the Rural Resilience Initiative (R4), as a risk intervemtion aims to increase the resilience of small holder farmers to climatic shocks through a combination of four risk management strategies, namely: R1 - Disaster Risk Reduction and safety nets, R2 - Risk Transfer (Insurance), R3- Prudent Risk Taking (Credit) and R4- Risk Reserves (Savings). The R4 harmonizes these four risk management strategies which aims to reduce household vulnerability and food insecurity caused and intensified by climate change and associated hazard. In the long term R4 will build the resilience of the vulnerable rural populations to climate risks, farmers trained in conservation farming, enhanced food security and linking them to insurance.