In the arid and semi-arid lands of the Lakipia, Isiolo and Samburu counties of Kenya, the four-year LISTEN project contributes to strengthening the counties’ resilience to climate change by increasing food, nutrition, and water security. Funded by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Kenya, the project is implemented by SNV in partnership with Frontier Counties Development Council (FCDC) and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

In a country where agriculture remains a key driver of economic and social development, climate change projections for East Africa (Kenya in particular) paint a disturbing picture in efforts to achieve food resilience and security. Projections of increasing temperatures, reduced rainfall, seasonal shifts, and more frequent climate shocks (droughts and floods) are set to exacerbate the challenges faced by an agriculture sector that is already plagued by low productivity and food crop production. Factors that have led to this include increasing urbanisation and subdivision of high and medium potential land, limited access to finance and quality inputs, low capacities of national institutions to support the sector, and an over reliance on rainfed agriculture.

The approach

The LISTEN project seeks to strengthen institutional capacities for climate change adaptation at county level, and increase smallholder famers’ knowledge and adoption of climate-smart irrigation technologies and practices, while applying an Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) approach along the Ewaso Nyíro basin. The project adopts a nexus approach to implementation, i.e., recognising and leveraging on-going and complementary activities of agencies across and in different sectors, drawing in community support in these initiatives, and carrying out service delivery with support from the private sector, where possible. The project is anchored in county government ownership, and has as its ambition to realise scale by working at county, landscape, community, and farmer levels.

Set to be completed by 3 March 2024, the project operates with a total funding of € 3.6 M.

Expected outcomes

• Outcome 1:  Improved institutional capacities and programming frameworks for inclusive climate resilience at the county level.

• Outcome 2: Improved water and livelihood resource management at landscape level in the Ewaso Nyiro River Basin Ecosystem.

• Outcome 3: Increased production and incomes through the adoption and scale‐up of Good Agricultural Practice (GAP), good management, and efficient water practices, technologies and innovations in selected value chains.

• Outcome 4: Increase ASALs’ use of knowledge and innovative management practices.

Expected results

• Strengthened country government capacity to operationalise the National Climate Change Action Plan in counties and improve ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ coordination. This will be supported by the domestication of the nexus approach within counties.

• Enhanced multi-stakeholder coordination along the focus basin to address resource use and management.

• Good agricultural practices and climate-smart irrigation technologies and innovations introduced, made accessible, and adopted by irrigators along the Ewaso Nyíro Basin.

• Six feasible business cases developed and implemented.

The project is designed to reach 180,000 beneficiaries; 20,000 households; 1,000 participating actors from government agencies and the private sector including women/women‐owned companies, 66% of whom shall be women and young people.