Families in the Nampula Adaptation to Climate Change project in northern Mozambique were able to grow more food, better respond to crises, and save more money. They also were able to adopt many climate change practices on their fields that helped them increase production by lowering the amount of tilling in the field—so lower workloads, but better results. The first thing families in Mozambique invest in when they get more savings and credit is their children’s education.
The Nampula Adaptation to Climate Change project reached 32,720 people in northern Mozambique. It was funded by the German government for $3.7 million from 2015-2018.
What did we accomplish?
- Families can recover from shocks: The number of people who could recover from shocks nearly doubled, from 46% at baseline to 82% at endline. This is substantially higher for people in the project than the 71% of the comparison group who also improved their resilience.
- People have more, better food: Families were more than twice as likely to have enough food to last 10 months at the end of the project as at the beginning. On average, they had an additional 1.42 months of food security. Families also increased the diversity of their diets, and were 60% more likely to have adequate diets.
- Farmers are changing their practices: Farmers were more than 6 times more likely to use climate-smart agriculture. 88% of farmers adopted at least 2 climate change adaptation practices, compared to 15% at baseline.
- Narrowed the gap between men and women: Women in the project were 7.5 times more likely to be able to access credit, up to 30% at the end of the project. Men were 1.7 times more likely, up to 39%. This cuts the gap between men and women nearly in half.
- More education: Women and men both invested their newfound savings and credit in education for their kids and in increasing their household assets. Education saw the biggest change in investment, with nearly 5 times as many families investing in it at the end of the project.
How did we get there?
- Focus on savings: The project was able to triple access to savings for families in the project using community VSLA groups.
- Help communities access knowledge and quality services: Farmers’ access to services more than tripled over the life of the project. The number of people who knew about conservation agriculture techniques more than doubled, from 40% at baseline to 96% at the end of the project. Non-participants also got some benefits, and 59% of them knew more at the end of the project. 80% of farmers were satisfied with the services they received.
- Think beyond the farm: The project took a traditional Farmers Field School—which focuses primarily on farming practices—and added components on gender and nutrition to help communities increase gender equality and nutrition as well as production.
- Plan for scale: The project partnered with government to design models that the government buys into and can scale after the program ends. It also trained 475 government and civil society actors on those models.
Want to learn more?
Check out the project’s final evaluation.