The R4 Rural Resilience initiative aims to help the rural poor protect their crops and livelihoods from impacts of climate variability and change, and relies on providing farmers and food-insecure households with integrated risk management tools in a four-part approach.
19 September 2011: The World Food Programme (WFP) and Oxfam America have committed to expanding their R4 Rural Resilience initiative, with support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Swiss RE, from Ethiopia to Senegal over the next five years.
The public-private partnership aims to help the rural poor protect their crops and livelihoods from impacts of climate variability and change, and will expand the work from Ethiopia to Senegal and two other countries over the coming years. The programme relies on providing farmers and food-insecure households with integrated risk management tools in a four-part approach. This approach relies on community risk reduction through improved natural resource management, allowing for prudent risk taking through access to microcredit, providing for risk transfer through gaining insurance coverage, and preparing risk reserves by increasing savings.
The expansion and future global development of the initiative will be funded by a US$8 million award from USAID to WFP. The work is supported by Swiss RE as the exclusive insurance sector partner that will lead the design of risk transfer solutions, as well as contribute US$1.25 million to the initiative.
The pilot programme in Ethiopia emerged from the Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation (HARITA) project, which scaled up activities from 200 households in one village to over 13,000 households in 43 villages in three years. In the R4 project, farmers are able to pay for insurance premiums through labor in food-and-cash-for work programmes, with the labor contributing to community projects. [WFP Press Release]