Putting the private sector at the centre of climate-smart agriculture

Published in May 2019 in the CTA Technical Brief Series, this brief Putting the private sector at the centre of climate-smart agriculture by Una May Gordon, Thomas Were and Oluyede Ajayi shows how the private sector contributes to the conceptualisation, design, delivery and evaluation of climate-smart agricultural (CSA) interventions and can help bring them to scale. It draws from three very different projects in East and Southern Africa and the Caribbean to show how engaging the private sector from conceptualisation through delivery and evaluation delivers results. The projects are: The Small Farmers Agro-tourism Linkage project in Jamaica, the CLI-MARK project in Kenya and Ethiopia, and a project on scaling up CSA in Southern Africa. The brief concludes that engaging the private sector in CSA interventions enhances the applicability – and thus the sustainability of interventions, increases uptake and delivers a triple win for donors, beneficiaries and the private sector. Private-sector players will be more likely to engage in scaling-up of CSA when they can see a compelling business case to justify their investments.

This brief is one of the outputs of the seminar Catalysing actionable knowledge to implement climate-smart solutions for next-generation ACP agriculture, held on 22-25 January 2019 in Wageningen, The Netherlands.