المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

The climate change is the main challenge for the Government and Population to mitigate in the coming year. Self Help Africa as an International NGO recognize that the most affected by the climate change are the women and children in the rural area in Africa. Also, the Government's data show that the women are more impacted by the poverty in the rural Africa. So considerating the question as an organisation:

1) The means issues for the policy makers are to undertstand what technologies and actions could address clearly the climate change issues. So they need to promote proven practices rathers than moving on theoricals actions which will not meet the beneficiaries demand. So they need to consider research and demonstrate before to scale up. It's a approach of Self Help Africa, to learn and understand better before to expand in a specific area and population.

2) The key institutionnal and governance challenge for the policy makers is to consider the women and the children as the key and strategiques beneficiraires of the programmes and actions to address climate extremes (drought and flood). Investing in women will help the families to keep the harvest at home, to control the sales of the grains and others products and diversify the food consumption within the household. Investing in women means involving men to have their support in the project and to take the household as of the beneficiary. In this case, women will easily aaccess to land and inputs for crop production. For example, Self Help Africa have implemented a soya value chain project in Savanah Region in Togo since 2011, the women are around 80% of the benficiaries and the activities include gender mainstraining with women and men in the same cooperatives and after 3 years, women increased their access to  land from 0.125 ha to 0.25 ha (100% of increase) with the support of their husband and their soya production contributed to increase to 28.41% of the household income and  the consumption of the soya dishes in the households and through the Local Heath Center agaisnt the under five children undernutrition increase by 85%. The soya have been produced with drought tolerant seeds.

3) As best practice sfrom our experiance are to promote affordable drip irrigation for crop production. A action research conducted from 2012 to 2015 showed than drip irrigation could reduce the water consumption by at least 30%, reduce the labour by 74% comparing with using water can and increase the yield of tomato by 48%, cabbage by 253% and maize by 118%. The drip irrigation have been promoted with compost use and a plantation of 1100 utilitarian local trees around the gardens.