How to Apply for African Agriculture Climate Adaptation Research System Request for Proposals (Up to USD $100,000 in funding available)

How to Apply for African Agriculture Climate Adaptation Research System Request for Proposals (Up to USD $100,000 in funding available)

African Agriculture Climate Adaptation Research System Request for Proposals, Record high food prices have sparked a global crisis that will push millions more into extreme poverty, exacerbate hunger and malnutrition, while threatening to wipe out hard-earned growth. While some of the triggers for this crisis can be modified through geopolitical diplomacy and justice, others, such as climate change and increasing variability, need a more coordinated, responsive and sustained effort by scientists and policymakers.

Climate change and food security have an immutable link. Climate change has a cascading effect from agroecosystems to agricultural production, to people and countries, and ultimately to consumers dependent on reliable food production and availability. Africa is already experiencing and will continue to experience the downstream impacts of climate change, underscoring the need for climate adaptation food systems. In August 2020, a research prioritization exercise conducted by 1,202 food security and nutrition researchers on the African continent identified that the priority needs in climate-adapted food systems were:

• Highlight and enhance interventions that increase the resilience of agrifood systems to climate-related shocks (drought, pests, floods or pandemics such as COVID-19 etc).
• Provide accessible and acceptable options for scaling up climate smart agricultural practices e.g. reduce emissions from agriculture, prevent loss of biodiversity, prevent soil degradation and soil nutrient depletion etc.
• Investigate agricultural practices that can reverse the negative impacts of intensive agriculture while at the same time combat acute and chronic food insecurity.

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Responding to existing food security challenges in the face of climate change will require increased productivity both to meet consumer demands and to limit further expansion of agricultural land into natural ecosystems. An adaptation modeling scenario showed that a 25% increase in crop yields would almost completely offset the impact of climate change on child malnutrition. However, we also need to increase the reliability of production (not just the average), as annual climate fluctuations and shocks increase risk for small-scale producers. Approaches needed to address climate change must take into account the constraints faced by African small-scale producers, including limited access to irrigation and finance, nutrient-poor soils, and often poor access to markets and value-added food systems.

We suggest that adaptation to climate change is a cyclical process rather than a single innovation or intervention. Sustainable and equitable climate adaptation will require strengths in each element of the adaptation cycle. Each part of this cycle must be owned and managed by dedicated local groups, countries and stakeholders, and relies on a strong and committed network of African climate and adaptation scientists.

In this RFP, Grand Challenges Africa would be interested in supporting efforts to strengthen the process and system level aspects of this virtuous cycle.

We believe that sustainable, organized investments in the African continent that focus not only on the scientific innovator, but also on the gaps in the scientific innovation ecosystem (e.g. research centers, government, private sector, funding sources, etc.) will yield non- reversible gains for translational sciences and are essential for enhancing climate adaptability. Our investments will focus on activities and innovations that support the science adaptation ecosystem in a sustainable way, rather than supporting individual interventions. We are interested in strengthening the research base for climate adaptation planning, risk management, translation from research to action, and investing for success for each country’s climate agriculture system.

The Challenge

This RFP seeks innovative approaches to enhance climate adaptation for agriculture in Africa in ways that link directly with and strengthen the ecosystem of local actors and institutions. We are looking for 18-24 month projects that will address the objective below.

Specifically, the objective of the challenge will be:

To support innovations that strengthen agriculture-related risk management processes and adaptation prioritization, planning, and investment, through intra-Africa research collaboration on data, data science, and modeling. For example.

• Programming that promotes co-learning, trainings, and/or scientist exchanges to strengthen capacities around specific core agricultural adaptation data-related research areas, e.g., modelling and data analysis, data translation for decision makers, etc.,
• Methods for coordinating among researchers and institutions to support prioritization of climate resilient innovations for a given landscape, assessment of impact from previous priorities and changing climate context, and reprioritization based on responsive learnings, etc. These methods may include:
  • Developing and delivering innovations in connecting ecosystem actors across agriculture, water, planning & development, environment (etc.) sectors
  • Ways to integrate local perspectives and help balance trade-offs, costs, and benefits of adaptation
  • Strategies to improve productivity in indigenous agrifood systems, based on indications of robustness to projected climate change and variability

• Innovative systems for collecting data and quantifying the impacts of climate-smart interventions on SSP livelihood, consumption, micronutrient deficiencies, obesity, etc. This may include data collection as well as analytics, e.g., ways to distinguish between benefits under a variety of climate conditions, and the cost and benefits in poor, good, average years.
• Strengthened FAIR data management practices for agricultural and climate data programs, including genetic information, enabling data sharing and collaboration
• Platforms to mobilize additional investments in national and regional centres of excellence for climate-smart R&D, e.g., at the smaller-scale connecting innovators and researchers with donors, to larger scale support for institutional processes.

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Funding level

Seed projects (proof of concept projects) – studies that have a new idea that needs to be validated and data collected to support or confirm the idea – USD $100,000.

Transition to scale projects – projects that have proved their concept works and need to validate in a controlled environment as they seek to develop the product or process and prepare it for scaling – USD $200,000.

How to Apply

Applications should be submitted via the SFA Foundation’s Grant Management System – Agaseke accessed here: https://agaseke.scienceforafrica.foundation/Login.aspx  

Application Deadline

Applications due no later than 15 January 2023, 5:00 p.m. East Africa Time