Importance of livelihood information in supporting policy decisions and targeting assistance: stakeholder meetings in Kampala

27th May 2019

Last week, Evidence for Development’s John Seaman, Celia Petty and Dai Clegg attended the final HyCRISTAL AGM in Kampala. During the meeting, EfD Senior Associate James Acidri (MP) gave the keynote speech in which he stressed the fact that climate change was already affecting the lives of millions of Ugandans and underlined the importance of livelihood information in supporting policy decisions and targeting assistance. The IDAPS platform, which is being developed by EfD, will be a key legacy of this project as it provides a means of linking climate information and crop models to produce reliable livelihood impact scenarios. An IDAPS stakeholder consultation was held after the AGM, involving farmers from Mukono district (which is a site of some of the early HEA and IHM HyCRISTAL field studies), district level decision makers, and national policy makers. Each group developed ‘use cases’ relevant to their specific needs and priorities, which will be used to guide further IDAPS outputs.

A NIMFRU project stakeholder meeting took place after the HyCRISTAL AGM and IDAPS meetings. This DfID-NERC project is developing improved ways of predicting and responding to the impact of flooding on smallholder farmers in north eastern Uganda. The NIMFRU project involves the use of HEA and IHM data to predict the impact of seasonal flooding, as well as an extension of the IDAPS platform to support targeted seasonal flood impact analysis. As the project progresses, community radio and local ‘Farmer Agri-Met listening groups’ will be involved in communicating findings directly to affected communities and to local councils with responsibility for mitigating flood impact.