Success Story: Strategic Environmental Assessment of Rwanda's agriculture sector

Enhancing environmental sustainability and climate resilience of national agriculture planning and EU support

© John Pratt

Rwanda's economy is heavily dependent on the agriculture sector, due to its current contribution to the economy, its potential for growth and its role in sustaining rural livelihoods. For many years the European Union has been providing assistance to Rwanda's rural development, more recently through supporting the implementation of the country's Programme for the Transformation of Agriculture (SPTA) and the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPR). As part of its efforts to integrate the environment and climate change in development cooperation, the EU carried out a successful Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of the Agriculture Sector in Rwanda.

The SEA was conducted in 2012 by the EU Delegation to Rwanda, the Government of Rwanda - through its Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources (MINAGRI) -, and other donors, during the formulation phase of Rwanda’s Strategic Programme for the Transformation of Agriculture III (SPTA3) for the period 2013-2018.

The overall objective of the SEA was to ensure that environmental concerns are appropriately integrated in the agriculture sector, and in the rural feeder roads sub-sector, throughout the decision-making, policy development, implementation and monitoring processes of all development actors involved.

Rwanda’s SEA entailed two key phases: a scoping study and an SEA study. The scoping study identified key environment and climate change issues in the agriculture sector to be addressed by the SEA, taking into account both the effects of degraded natural resources and of climate change on the sector’s performance, as well as the existing potential impact of actions in the agriculture sector on the environment and climate vulnerability. Key issues identified were then discussed and validated in a stakeholders’ workshop. The SEA study assessed these issues in detail and identified options to address them and to generate opportunities. Field visits were made in close coordination with MINAGRI, in order to verify issues at a local level and engage in local level stakeholder consultations.

Key recommendations of Rwanda’s SEA

The findings of Rwanda’s agriculture sector SEA generated recommendations for the improvement of the environmental sustainability of SPTA-3, including the following:

• promoting soil and water conservation as an integral policy focus;
• objective monitoring of soil erosion with comparable reporting across the country;
• focusing on increasing yields with optimisation in use of inputs rather than increased application of inorganic fertilisers, including management of nutrients, soil acidity, pests and disease, and optimised use of fertilisers based on nutrient needs;
• and building flexibility into the Crop Intensification Program to enhance environmental performance and climate resilience.

Risk management: Inter-planting climbing beans and maize, Nyagatare Distrct © John Pratt

Some of the recommendations went beyond the boundaries of the core agricultural sector institutions, e.g. opportunities to enhance environmental performance in the agriculture sector that are better handled by the Environment and Natural Resources competent authorities, including the strengthening of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) system and opportunities to enhance environmental enforcement capacities.

An important aspect of Rwanda’s SEA is that recommendations were tailored for each development actor and relevant policy: MINAGRI, non-agriculture sector institutions, EDPRS, Common Performance Assessment Framework (CPAF), and the European Commission. Actions recommended were prioritised.

Recommendations addressed specifically to the EU Delegation to Rwanda included developing performance indicators for the disbursement of variable tranches; addressing a number of issues with the national partners through policy dialogue, such as the multi-sectoral harmonisation of environmental indicators relevant to the agriculture sector; and recommendations to strengthen the formulation of the Sector Policy Support Programme for Rural Feeder Roads with regards to environmental sustainability and climate resilience of roads.

Impact of the SEA

The assessment and recommendations significantly informed the design of the EUR 200 million sector reform contract to enhance the agriculture sector's sustainable use of land and water resources, value creation and contribution to nutrition security. The SEA has become an important reference for both central- and district-level spending on feeder roads and the ongoing design of feeder road development policy and strategy.

Rwanda’s SEA key success factors

A number of elements contributed to make this a successful SEA. Among these we can highlight:

• the timing of the exercise: the SEA took place during the Rwandan government´s own planning cycle, but also coincided with the formulation of the EU´s support to the sector, feeding thus into both planning processes in a timely manner;
• a high degree of ownership by the government and the EU, allowing the process to be steered so as to satisfy their analytical needs and interests;
• the scope and approach to the SEA was also coordinated with the other donors active in the sector, ensuring a single exercise useful to all;
• meaningful opportunities for participation were given throughout the SEA, allowing insights to be gathered by a wide range of actors, but also encouraging relevant discussions and exchanges between national actors;
• targeted recommendations, distinguishing technical from systemic issues, allowed a more structured analysis of findings by each institution concerned;
• recommendations covered crosscutting sectors, such as Environment and Natural Resources (ENR), local government and transport infrastructure;
• results were meaningfully discussed with the national partners, so the SEA recommendations could find their way into the relevant policies and support programmes;
• broad dissemination of results ensured the SEA could have an ongoing impact, by establishing itself as a reference document in the sector.

Agriculture is an environmentally sensitive sector. Its practices can undermine natural resources by degrading the environment (i.e. soil erosion, loss of biodiversity or deforestation). However, this success story shows how an integrated approach to developing this sector can provide opportunities to improve the state of the environment and contribute to climate change adaptation.