Success stories

This page contains features that go beyond news to showcase success stories in different ways: interviews, scale up notes, factsheets…

Resource Partners
08 Mar 2019
In Zambia, where the majority of the population relies on agriculture for a living, ensuring food self-sufficiency is a stepping-stone for poor communities to develop and lift families out of the poverty trap. With EU support of more than EUR 12 million (USD 14 million), FAO worked alongside the Ministry of Agriculture in Zambia to launch the Conservation Agriculture Scaling Up Project in 2013. It set out to increase productivity and production of crops in 31 districts across Zambia. The project benefited more than 229 000 Zambian farmers - 40 percent of them women. In addition, it specifically zoomed in...
Resource Partners
07 Mar 2019
In Syria, irrigated agriculture has been significantly affected by the protracted crisis. Ongoing conflict has resulted in extensive damage to irrigation facilities, including distribution canals and pumping stations. Moreover, high fuel prices and electricity outages have further affected farmers in all agro-ecological zones where irrigation is normally provided for agriculture purposes. Many farmers using diesel pumps had to either cut back on irrigation or revert to rain-fed production, where feasible and economically viable. Not surprisingly, the efficiency of the irrigation systems in Syria significantly decreased since the onset of the crisis. With support from the Italian Development...
Resource Partners
07 Mar 2019
An FAO, IFAD, WFP, and UN Women joint programme
  “After expanding the milk business and saving enough, my plan is to purchase another milking cow to increase the supply.” Safaya Kabato, 45-year-old mother of nine children, from Oromia in Ethiopia The UN Joint Programme for Accelerating Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment (JP...
Resource Partners
25 Feb 2019
A sustainable livelihood oriented approach
"We selected training topics like greenhouse, olive, pistachio, irrigation and cotton production, keeping in mind employment possibilities. Half of all cotton production takes place in our province and it is in this sector where we most need workers." Adnan Yetkin, a project coordinator Refugee populations have limited livelihood potential with no access to formal job opportunities, a situation that can lead to instability and social tension between host and refugee communities. One consequence of the seven-year Syrian crisis is over 4.8 million refugees have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt posing a significant burden on...
Resource Partners
14 Feb 2019
Crop yield changes under different climate scenarios
The Near East and North Africa (NENA) region has the lowest per-capita fresh water resource availability among all regions of the world and in the coming decades, it faces a severe intensification of water scarcity as well as more frequent, intense and long droughts. The agriculture sector will be particularly affected, as wheat yields, olive tree yields, and numbers of livestock are projected to decline under all climate change scenarios. Given that agriculture consumes 85 percent of fresh water, the agricultural industry will need to enhance its water efficiency and productivity. At the government level, policy reform...