Agriculture - People targeted
Objectives
- To protect and sustain core-agricultural livelihoods of households affected by conflict, climate shocks, and displacement in Ethiopia through emergency livelihoods humanitarian interventions in 2024.
To enhance vulnerable households’ capacities to withstand multiple overlaying recurrent and future shocks in Ethiopia through resilience interventions.
The Agriculture Cluster works closely with Food, Nutrition, Health, Wash, Protection and others clusters, as well as with the relevant technical ministries of Government of Ethiopia, donors, HDPN actors and other stakeholders, to ensure a coherent, coordinated, and effective humanitarian response as well as a complementary resilience strategy where possible.
The Cluster seeks to support and strengthen the food security of targeted population, by protecting and sustaining the core agricultural production and livelihoods affected by multiple overlaying recurrent shocks. By sustaining production the Cluster aim at improving safe access to healthy, diverse, and nutritious food in a stable manner to different population group. This is expected to contribute not only to food security but also to nutrition and health outcomes and to mitigate and reduce where possible protection issues of boys, girls, women and marginalized groups.
The Cluster seeks to enhance vulnerable households’ capacity to withstand recurrent and future shocks in Ethiopia through resilience interventions. This will contribute towards the ability of these households to recover from crises, and natural hazards and reinforce their coping capacity: strengthening the nexus with development actors will be key to achieve it in a comprehensive manner.
Response
Life sustaining emergency livelihood support will aim at protecting productive assets and livelihoods to increase food availability and access at households and community level for approximately 9.1million severely food insecure people, including non-displaced, returnees, IDPs out of camps and with access to land. Ad hoc measures, activities and technical support is envisaged for those areas experiencing or at risk of drought, floods and pests.
Priority activities will include provision of seasonally appropriate agricultural inputs such as quality seed, tools, fertilizers, and irrigation support. Emergency livestock assistance such as vaccinations, supplementary feed distributions, and forage production will also be delivered. The Cluster will prioritize also the “Cash Plus” approach where households can be supported with cash in addition to agriculture inputs to ensure immediate food needs are met while agriculture activities are being implemented. Emergency assistance to pastoral and agropastoral communities will be crucial to avoid the adoption of irreversible coping mechanisms such as the selling of productive livestock with risk of, food assistance dependency, malnutrition and general destitution.
Cluster partners will look also at rehabilitating critical water infrastructure to improve access to water for livestock in the predominantly pastoral districts.
The disease control strategies will mainly focus on prophylaxis and curative treatment since vaccinated and treated animals shall be able to better tolerate diseases and keep the key nutritious elements to contribute to household’s food security. The livestock activities will improve the livestock body conditions and increase the milk production which has an immediate impact on the nutrition well-being, especially of children. According to a study, cow ownership is positively correlated with improved milk and dairy product consumption by children . This contributes to linear growth and reduced stunting.
Food insecurity is currently driven by multiple overlaying shocks and therefore requires a multi-sectoral response to achieve impact. The Cluster will collaborate with the Food Cluster on integrated programming, to improve food access, availability and stability. The Cluster will ensure linkages with nutrition actors and identify areas of convergence for joint interventions in agreed prioritized areas. Activities will include nutrition sensitive agriculture including animal assets’ protection to ensure nutritious food access to the households hosting malnourished children. The Cluster will prioritize locations in severity level 3 and 4 and affected by multiple shocks of conflict, climatic shocks, and pests as identified in the Household Economy Analysis. Some of those areas will be targeted with ad hoc strategies and intersectoral activities to have a higher impact. Considering women’s significant contribution throughout all agriculture sectors in Ethiopia, the Cluster members agreed to ensure a gender-inclusive agriculture response. The Cluster strategy will include activities targeting women in the specific, and consider those which will have a direct positive impact for women to address specific needs and gaps and strengthen their resilience. The Agriculture Task Force (ATF) partners will adopt a people’s centered approach in planning, implementation, monitoring, and reporting, ensuring effective communication, community engagement, and inclusive engagement for children, youth, and elderly including people with varying degrees of disability and of women and girls, men, and boys (gender). The provision of agriculture assistance shall factor in all protection risks (GBV, child labour, etc.) for the target families and that effective systems of community complaint and feedback mechanisms are established to adjust where necessary.
Funding resources to address food insecurity by providing emergency livelihood support are critical and urgent. Ethiopia is witnessing crisis that have exacerbated households’ copying mechanisms and increased levels of extreme vulnerability. Failure to provide adequate livelihood support will have an immediate impact on aid dependency. Food insecurity, malnutrition, health and well-being of families will increase, but also communities and livelihoods cultural habits risk to be irreversibly affected.
The agriculture cluster will improve the timely delivery of agricultural inputs like seeds and fertilizer through, prioritizing resources disbursement for those activities strictly related to seasonality, when funding is made available with reasonable time ahead of the start of the season for agencies to initiate procurement and pre-positioning. In addition, all cluster members will be recommended to leverage on already ongoing procurements and top up, to shorten the procurement process. Moreover, members will be recommended to use of appropriate modalities such as conditional cash, vouchers, which will enable activities to be implemented in much shorter period.
Financial requirements
The Agriculture Cluster utilized the activity-based costing methodology, which was revised in consultations of regional bureaus, including the Regional Agriculture Bureaus, Agriculture cluster partners and the Cluster Lead Agency. Inflation as well as worldwide agriculture input prices increase were taken into consideration. The Cluster has designed packages able to respond to the needs of overlapping shocks (conflict, drought, floods, pests and economic challenges). The Cluster has also considered anticipatory action activities for the forecasted drought and floods during the Belg season. The Cluster will promote the use of the Cash Plus inputs approach and cash for livelihoods mainly for returnees and IDPs with access to land. The major cost driver for the sector is the cost of agricultural inputs (seeds, fertilizer, vaccines, drugs and tools). Poor availability of improved locally adaptable seeds is a challenge and, in some cases, the seed falls short of the required quality. This means some of the seeds need to be imported, resulting in a more costly response. The Cluster is working with the FAO and the Ministry of Agriculture to explore how partners can make use of improved locally produced seeds. And to increase sourcing of local quality input from certified cooperatives, unions and companies is paramount on 2024 strategy, and a Cluster taskforce will work on this at national and local level. In addition, by promoting the use of modalities such cash and vouchers, the beneficiaries will increase access to local landraces once new sources/markets are identified. The cost to deliver a response varies from one region to the other, but the differences in the cost of the agricultural inputs are not too significant, hence the use of the average cost for each activity across the regions was applied.
Monitoring
The Cluster will utilize the government led seasonal assessments, which are conducted twice a year (Belg and Meher seasonal assessment) to monitor the agriculture situation. The Household Economy Approach (HEA) will be used to monitor the situation using the livelihood deficit indicator. This will be monitored twice a year after the seasonal assessments, which provide part of the input for the HEA. The Cluster will seek to include gender, AAP and protection indicators in the sectoral assessments conducted by the Cluster partners and in the multi-sectoral seasonal assessments led by EDRMC. The Cluster will also rely on the DTM and Village assessments to monitor the IDP and returnee livelihood needs. Emergency Food Security Assessments (EFSA) or the Food Security Nutrition Monitoring (FSNMS) for the locations that are not covered by the seasonal assessments. The post-harvest assessments conducted by partners and FAO will also be used in the locations that are not covered by the seasonal assessments. Individual or Inter-agency sectoral assessments will be used to understand the situations, the Cluster will be recommending the use of the Cluster standardized tools for these assessments to enable collation and comparison across regions. A harmonized Post Distribution Monitoring will be utilized to monitor the response utilizing the expansive cluster footprint through the partners. The Cluster will develop a standardized Rapid Analysis Tool to monitor the response and to collect quick information at the onset of a hazard.
The Cluster, with the support of the Gender focal person conducts an analysis of the gender risks in agriculture, this analysis will inform a gender risk management plan for the Cluster. The partners will be encouraged to ensure that their projects integrate elements of Protection, including GBV. The Cluster will include one gender indicator in the response and will collect data on gender in the agriculture response through ActivityInfo. The Cluster has identified 5 Gender and GBV champions, these will be expected to ensure the agriculture, gender and GBV minimum commitments by the Cluster are met.