Once the resilience assessment is completed, data gathered will be integrated with other relevant information – especially related to present and foreseen climatic conditions in each country and region – with the final aim of providing farmer and pastoral communities with a toolbox of options for improving their resilience to climate change. Rather than a top down imposition of practices to adopt, this method will allow individuals and communities to discuss in a participatory way and pick the practices that best suit their needs. SHARP has been tested in several countries within the framework of GEF-funded Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) projects in sub-Saharan Africa – namely Uganda, Mali, Senegal and Zimbabwe. A SHARP training and piloting using the tablet application was carried out in Angola in March and April 2015 and involved around 30 local government officials, extension workers, representatives of cooperatives and AP/FFS facilitators. It also led to surprising findings, in that respondents within pastoral communities turned out to be more concerned about crop production issues (e.g. the lack of enough varieties, low productivity) rather than solely about livestock-related ones. This finding helped reconfigure the focus of the project towards the needs of the farmers and pastoralists. Later this year the SHARP documentation will be published as an FAO document, the SHARP application will be made available through the FAO Google Play store and an academic article on the SHARP methodology will be published in a peer reviewed journal. In August 2015, a second SHARP pilot will be organized in Niger, and further integration with GEF CCA projects is foreseen over 2015 and beyond. Partnership with NGOs and actors working on the ground are also being explored, in order to expand the outreach of SHARP to those organizations that already have solid grounding in the field and are in need of a tool for resilience assessment. SHARP is being developed to be easily adapted to different contexts and the SHARP team stands ready to provide information and support for colleagues who might be interested in applying a participatory self-assessment on resilience in their own projects. We welcome feedback on improving SHARP and are happy to answer any questions you may have on the tool. Please contact us at: [email protected] www.fao.org/agriculture/crops/thematic-sitemap/theme/spi/sharp/en/ |