Attachments
In June 2015, as a key component to reforms during its sixth replenishment cycle (GEF-6), the Global Environment Facility Council approved an Integrated Approach Pilot (IAP) program on Fostering Sustainability and Resilience for Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa. The integrated approach to programming resources supports recipient countries as they tackle the drivers of environmental degradation. This approach seeks to address various global environmental challenges in line with the targets and goals of the multilateral environmental agreements that the GEF serves. This allows countries to advance toward their commitments to more than one global convention or thematic area at the same time. The Food Security IAP was one of the three pilot programs to test the integrated approach. Sub-Saharan African nations, including 12 participating countries, have continued since that pilot to engage on sustainable food production, food security, and ecosystem and household resilience through GEF Integrated Programs in recent cycles.
The Food Security IAP, rebranded as Resilient Food Systems (RFS), aimed to promote sustainability and resilience among smallholder farmers through the integrated sustainable management of natural resources—land, water, and soils—and to improve resilience to a changing environment. The RFS program assumed that integration was the right direction for smallholder farmers, embracing resilience, global environment benefits, and food security by better managing and restoring agroecosystems in the drylands of Sub-Saharan Africa. To that end, it focused on targeted geographies and their millions of smallholder farmers to scale up the right mix of interventions to achieve sustainable intensification of agriculture and resilience for food security. Some cross-cutting issues were embedded in the approach, such as the empowerment of women, engaging the private sector through a value chain approach, adaptive management and learning, and linking of science, public policies, and agriculture practices.
The Global Environment Facility collaborated with the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) to convene a workshop in November 2024 to discuss their decade of experience from the Food Security IAP (Resilient Food Systems program) with sector experts and program partners. Participants reviewed what has worked in the effort to advance transformative change in agroecosystems in Sub-Saharan Africa, identified where there were gaps or areas that needed improvement, and discussed lessons learned. This report summarizes those findings.