Browse by Theme: Reviewed 2021

"Food insecurity is a growing concern throughout the developing world, particularly for poor women and children.

Estimates suggest that in 2010, approximately 925 million individuals were undernourished.1 While there have been some gains in reducing hunger globally, it remains a critical challenge, and it is unlikely that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to halve the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 20152 will be met.

A recent study on the future of food and farming identified six key drivers of change affecting the global food system: a growing global population; changing diets, notably an increase in demand for resource-intensive meat products;
food system governance, including globalisation of markets, subsidies and trade restrictions; competition for resources, particularly land, water and energy; consumer values and ethics; and the impacts of climate change.4 The combined effects of these pressures mean that increasing numbers of people will be at risk of hunger in the coming years.

While recognising that all of these drivers represent significant factors in achieving food security for all, this brief is focused on the impacts of climate change on food security in developing countries. Tackling this crisis will require unprecedented efforts on the part of the humanitarian and development community, researchers, governments, private sector and civil society organisations and farmers around the world. This brief outlines CARE’s understanding of the challenge and our response."

Empowered women lead on community-based adaptation to climate change.

Climate change poses the greatest direct threat in history to CARE’s vision of a world of hope, tolerance and social justice where poverty has been overcome and people live in dignity and security.

The injustice of climate change is that its negative impacts fall disproportionately on poor communities, who have contributed least to its causes.

CARE’s Adaptation Learning Programme (ALP), implemented in Ghana, Niger, Kenya and Mozambique with the support of DFID, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland and the Austrian Development Cooperation, acknowledges that inequitable distributions of rights, resources and power at all levels constrain many people’s abilities to take action on climate change.

ALP therefore seeks to improve and promote knowledge on how best to protect the livelihoods of the most vulnerable people through community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change.

Nowhere on the planet are people more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than in sub-Saharan Africa. The continent is already prone to erratic rainfall, droughts, floods and cyclones, and climate change will only exacerbate these ongoing challenges. At the same time, Africa is grappling with the burden of poverty, environmental degradation, inequitable land rights, heavy reliance on the natural resource base for livelihoods, and the HIV&AIDS epidemic - all of which limit the ability of people and institutions to adapt to climate change.

Community-level research conducted by CARE in Africa indicates that climate change is already having significant impacts on food and income security, and that these impacts are particularly serious for women and other marginalized groups.

The Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance (ACCRA) is an alliance of five development partners: Oxfam GB, the Overseas Development Institute, Save the Children, World Vision International and CARE International.

It was established in 2009 with the aim of understanding how development interventions can contribute to adaptive capacity at the community and household level, and to inform the design and implementation of development planning by governments and non-governmental development partners to support adaptive capacity for climate change and other development pressures.

This paper is based on an analysis of three country studies conducted by national research teams in eight research sites in Ethiopia, Uganda and Mozambique for ACCRA. It describes the Local Adaptive Capacity (LAC) framework developed for this project, its application during the research, and the evidence found about the impact of development interventions on the adaptive capacity of people and communities.

This CARE Market Engagement Innovations and Impacts Case Study features the experience of CARE’s multi-year Tsunami Response Program (TRP) , which was launched in response to the devastating tsunami that hit the east coast of India in 2004. The case study documents TRP’s progression from immediate, humanitarian relief and short-term rehabilitation efforts to long-term economic development interventions focused on rebuilding the livelihoods of marginalized coastal communities. The case focuses explicitely on a value chain approach applied in the smallholder salt sector through which CARE improved smallholder  productivity, processing capacity, and ability to mitigate risks while also enhancing market linkages and improving overall resilience in the chain. This case study provides practitioners and donors with an illustration of the potential for a value chain approach to reduce poverty and and social exclusion in a challenging, post-disaster environment.

The ADAPT project in Zambia: Successes and Lessons in Building a Scalable Network of Rural Agro Dealers to serve small holders