Attachments
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The R4 Rural Resilience Initiative (R4) is a strategic partnership between Oxfam America (OA) and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). R4 was initiated in 2011 to respond to the challenges faced by food insecure communities enduring increasingly frequent and intense climate disasters and other shocks. The program builds on the initial success of HARITA (Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation), an integrated risk management framework developed by Oxfam America, the Relief Society of Tigray (REST), Ethiopian farmers and several other national and global partners. R4 refers to the four risk management strategies integrated in the project to strengthen farmers’ food and income security. The initiative combines improved resource management (risk reduction), insurance (risk transfer), livelihoods diversification and microcredit (prudent risk taking), and savings (risk reserves).
This quarter marked the beginning of Phase 2 of R4 in Southern Africa thanks to funds from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). This second phase will see the scaling-up of the Initiative in Malawi and Zambia as well as the implementation of R4 in Zimbabwe. In 2017, partial premium cash contribution will be introduced in both Malawi and Zambia. So far in 2017 the initiative has reached 40,563 farmers and their households in Ethiopia,
Senegal and Zambia with microinsurance protection.1 In Ethiopia a total of 30,695 farmers enrolled in R4.