World Bank lends Kenya USD 250 million for climate smart agriculture project

World Bank has approved USD 250 million to finance agriculture productivity and offer assistance to smallholder farmers and pastoral communities to enable them endure vagaries of climate change.

Under a project dubbed, Kenya Climate Smart Agriculture Project that will run for five years. Finances will be deployed to fund eligible expenditures under the Immediate Response Mechanism in case of natural or man-made crises or disasters, severe economic shocks, or other crises and emergencies in Kenya.

“The objective of the Climate Smart Agriculture Project is to increase agricultural productivity and build resilience to climate change risks in the targeted smallholder farming and pastoral communities, and in the event of an eligible crisis or emergency, to provide immediate and effective response,” a statement from World Bank said.

The ministry of agriculture,livestock and fisheries will spend the money to finance activities such as up scaling agricultural practices, strengthening research, seed systems, supporting agro-weather, market, climate and advisory services, project coordination and emergency response.

Sixty percent of the financing will go towards rural services and infrastructure and water resource management while ten percent will be dedicated to supporting micro, small and medium enterprises.

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an integrated approach to managing landscapes,cropland, livestock, forests and fisheries that address the interlinked challenges of food security and climate change.

Broken down, the project has five components.

The first component being up-scaling climate smart agricultural practices while the second component is the strengthening climate-smart agricultural research and seed systems.

The third component is the supporting agro-weather, market, climate, and advisory services. This component will finance the development of agro-weather forecasting and marketing information system and their dissemination tools through three subcomponents.

The final phase will be marked by project coordination and management which will go a long way in financing activities related to national and county-level project coordination and management, including developing annual work plans, budgets (AWP&Bs) and fiduciary aspects (financial management and PR).