Perhaps the greatest learning in recent years has come from the program team’s action research on climate change adaptation through improved water management and harvesting, which earned it finalist positions at the World Bank’s 2008 Global Development Marketplace as well as the 5th World Water Forum (2008).
Ekorural mobilizes local potential around rainwater management as a means of rehabilitating the resource base, building resilience to climate variability and improving farm livelihoods. Rural families discover new methods of water harvesting and creatively use it to increase on-farm sustainable production and food security. This innovation is enabling farmers to overcome centuries of self-imposed limitations born from engrained dryland culture to respond to climate change.
Some of the results:
(1) Multiple new practices and technologies useful for storing and distributing water in smallholder production systems of semi-arid, mountainous regions
(2) Locally managed innovation investment funds established to sustain the work
(3) Households have developed and adopted new water harvesting technologies and will improve on-farm productivity by at least 30%
(4) Consolidation of learning-action approaches for enabling resource poor farmers to adapt to and cope with climate variability