1.0 Introduction
The African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) is a pan-African capacity building institution that seeks to develop strategic capacity for economic transformation and sustainable development of Africa. Since its establishment in 1991, the Foundation has catalysed scalable change across the continent by investing in capacity building initiatives in the public and private sectors and civil society organizations. The ACBF has supported capacity building interventions in over forty-five (45) African countries including the generation and dissemination of strategic knowledge products.
ACBF supports high-potential African organizations to become even more effective and sustainable. ACBF does this by working with organizations to identify opportunities for investment in capacity building to achieve greater impact.
The longstanding experiences of ACBF in providing capacity development solutions to its partners and other stakeholders in Africa have enabled the African Capacity Building Foundation to focus its capacity development initiatives in various sectors including government, health/biomedical sciences, among others. As it expands its support to other areas, ACBF is implementing a new programme that focuses on strengthening the capacity of leading institutions in Africa, spearheading climate adaptation interventions to be effective in their work and providing them with the opportunity to play an active role in policy making process at national, regional and global stages.
2.0 Rationale for this Call for Proposals
The African Capacity Building Foundation is implementing a program that seeks to improve the performance of organizations working on climate adaptation for a sustainable climate adaptation ecosystem on the continent. The overall expected outcome of the program is to have a strong group of Africa-based and African-led organizations capable of shaping Africa’s response to climate change through effective policy dialogue, advocacy, and use of a common voice for awareness raising and policy influence.
This project was conceived based on the knowledge that there is a dynamic nexus between climate change, food insecurity, and poverty; and that climate change is already stalling progress towards food security in Africa, interacting with multiple other stresses and shocks, including inequality, conflict, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, climate change is associated with reduced average precipitation and other extreme climate events, and therefore constitutes a threat to food production, and food security. Given the huge role of the agricultural sector in the African economy, the millions of smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend on it, and the growing challenges of hunger and food insecurity, agriculture needs serious and urgent attention, and the economic case for adaptation is particularly strong. Moreover, the already poor and vulnerable populations, most exposed to the impacts of climate change, have less capacity and access to resilience and adaptation support. Thus, without adaptation measures in agriculture sector, the impacts of climate change on poverty will be magnified. Adapting the agricultural sector to climate change bring benefits beyond higher crop yields and increased farm incomes. Those benefits include greater resilience to pandemics, lower inequities, more opportunities for women and youth, and ecosystem services like cleaner water as landscapes are restored. Therefore, enhancing the capacity of target organizations to deliver better climate adaptation services to agriculture sector will spur future development through generating green jobs, and ensuring stability and food security for the vulnerable, which will have positive impacts on many other human development indicators in Africa. read more about the call here
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