Contributions

FP2.8 Climate change

Climate change has traditionally not been accounted for in post-farm gate or input systems applications. Most analysis has been focused on the impact of climate change and variability on farm production and the natural resource base. However, variable production supply can have profound impacts on demand for inputs and the supply and quality of farm outputs. This has consequences for risk management, credit worthiness, and raises the need for strategies to adapt. In FP2 there is an opportune chance to integrate climate change considerations into the impacts and adaptation of systems beyond the farm boundary. This will be done through accounting for climate impacts on the biophysical elements of the analytical models (CoA2.2); selecting use cases in CoA2.1 that cover at-risk agroecologies; and in CoA2.3 taking explicit account of climate change as a driver or opportunity for innovation at-scale.

FP2.9 Gender

FP2 proposes to offer ‘social organization arrangements and novel partnerships’ as part of a suite of methodologies to stimulate post-farm processing, marketing and trade of dryland cereals and legumes with a view of enhancing legumes/ cereals productivity and sustainability in the drylands. This is an opportunity for GLDC to consider ‘gainful engagement of women in legumes/cereals value chains’ as well as contributing to the ‘engaging the youth sensitive rural transformation’.

Rural women may not be able to participate in the ‘typical free market systems’ but F2P is committed to bringing out their earning potential in the legume and cereals value chains. Women provide a significant amount of labor in legume and cereals production, as well as the family care and community maintaining responsibilities; which limits their time/possibility to engage with markets, especially if they have to move away from home. Some of the GLDC target regions are in social cultural contexts whose norms and practices still limit the participation of women in public domains because of religious or social norms¹⁸⁰, hampering their possibility of engaging with the markets directly. Women in the drylands are increasingly taking responsibility to head households when men migrate to urban areas in search of employment¹⁸¹, and need to generate income from their agricultural activities. When women generate income, they are also more likely to spend on household needs – food, school, medical needs, clothes – which challenges their ability to reinvest in businesses thereby impacting on sustainability of businesses. With sensitivity to these constraints, FP2, in collaboration with FP1/PIM/Gender Platform will design and test social organizational arrangements that support women’s earning potential, monitor impacts of these arrangements on women’s empowerment, on household and community power relations and sustainability over time.

The term ‘youth’ is often applied as if young people are one social category that is homogenous. Increasingly, its appreciated that ‘young people have multiple identities, are dynamic and at a transition’¹⁸². Based on geographical regions they are in, the opportunity structure in their social-economic-political environment, and their embeddedness in families, social networks and communities, as well as norms and expectations related to age and gender, their agency and capacity to engage with ‘various sectors of the value chains’ for business development will differ. FP2 is committed to re-socializing understanding of ‘youth of the drylands’, and designing and testing organization arrangements, novel partnerships and pathways of engaging with the ‘various/different categories of youth’ in strategic areas of the legume/cereals value chains (from farming to trade) and contributing to ‘youth sensitive rural transformation’ of the drylands.