Training workshops on Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA)

Accelerating the Impact of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) is a new initiative that seeks to enhance access to climate information services and validated climate-smart agriculture technologies in Africa. It is a 3-year project funded by the World Bank and implemented in 6 African countries including 3 countries in West Africa (Ghana, Mali, and Senegal). The Project aims to strengthen the capacity of targeted CCAFS (CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security) partners and stakeholders, and to enhance access to climate information services and validated climate-smart agriculture technologies in the eligible countries in Africa. With the support of AICCRA projects, farmers and livestock keepers would be able to better anticipate climate-related events and take preventative actions, with better access to climate advisories linked to information about effective response measures. This would help communities better safeguard their livelihoods and the environment. The project has 3 main components including (1) Knowledge Generation and Sharing, (2) Strengthening Partnerships for Delivery, and (3) Validating Climate-Smart Agriculture Innovations through Piloting. In Ghana, AICCRA is implemented by various CGIAR institutions and NGOs led by the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Benin. As climate information is key in the process, in collaboration with IITA, the World Agroforestry (ICRAF/SAHEL) has organized a training of trainers in Kumasi for field agents involved in the implementation of the project in Ghana to understanding and implementing the Participatory and Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA) approach. Developed by the University of Reading in the framework of CCAFS project, PICSA has been taken to scale and adapted widely in West Africa by ICRAF/SAHEL since 2015. PICSA is an approach that has been developed for extension agents to enable them to improve the support provided to farmers considering climate information relevant to the locality of the farmers. PICSA goes beyond climate prediction, because in the approach farmers begin long before the start of the season exploring several options based on historical climate information for their locality. This involves using participatory planning tools to help farmers making adequate decisions based on precise climate and meteorological information specific to their localities and options for agriculture, livestock/ fishery production and other locally relevant livelihood options. The training had taken place from June 14 to 18

Training workshops on Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS)

To help farmers coping with the negative impact of climate change CORAF and ICRAF are collaborating with various partners including AGRHYMET, Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security research program (CCAFS), the University of Reading, national meteorological and hydrological Services, nationalresearch institutes and variousNGOsinmanyWestAfrican countriesto implement innovative approaches such as climate smart agriculture (CSA), climate smart village (CSV) and Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA). Since 2015, ICRAF has implemented PICSA approach in 8 West African countries including Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Togo, and Senegal. PICSA is an innovative approach with the objective to help farmers taking adequate decisions based on current and historical climate and meteorological data specific to their localities, also considering the options of crops, livestock and farming and other relevant livelihood options for farmers. The implementation of PICSA approach requires historical climate data and forecast locally specific to the area where each farmer is living. However, it is known that in sub-Saharan zone, the meteorological network is not very dense. Many localities lack climate information data and even where it exists, the quality is often questioned. To remedy this, ENACTS (Enhancing National Climate Services) has been developed by the Institute for Research for Development and Society (IRI) to make it possible to establish a correlation between the few observed data that exist and those of satellite images, and from this correlation, extrapolate to generate data with acceptable qualities for sites where data are missing. Based at the university of Columbia, IRI collaborates with AGRHYMET for the development and scaling of the ENACTS approach in West Africa. Along the same line, ICRAF, CORAF and AGHRYMET have agreed to organize ENACTS-MERGING training that aims to build the capacity of meteorological agents so that they can benefit from the latest performances of the ENACTS approach and be able to produce historical climate data graphs useful for PICSA implementation. A total of 20 participants coming from Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal attended the training workshop in Dakar, Senegal from June 28 to July 2, 2021. Mr. Bernard Minoungou from AGRHYMET was the main facilitator of this 5 days training workshop. Dr. Rija Faniriantsoa from IRI also followed the process and supported with one presentation on Introduction to Climate Data Tools (CDT)