Emergency Food Security Project

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The proposed Second Additional Financing scales up selected interventions to enhance food availability and production. Furthermore, it expands its scope to activities that create sustainable economic opportunities in agriculture and food systems through crop diversification and strengthened value chain linkages, ensuring the target households have the necessary means to access and acquire food. To align the project with the expanded scope, a number of adjustments have been proposed, including revising the PDO, recalibrating the key performance indicators and targets, and changes to the components. The PDO will be updated to “improve food security through promoting resilience and commercialization of agriculture production systems for target beneficiaries”. Component 1: “Restoring Agriculture Production”, will be renamed as “Building Resilience for Food Security.” This component will continue to support food production in IPC3+ areas by providing drought-tolerant seeds, high-quality fertilizers, and promoting climate-smart agricultural practices. An input voucher system will be introduced to facilitate a market-based input supply through Agro-dealers, marking a key step towards the commercialization of the seed system. Furthermore, in collaboration with selected CGIAR centers, the project will support the introduction of new breeding lines of various crops.Component 2: "Provision of Water and Resilience Services," will scale up existing interventions in irrigation and watershed management, focusing on water conservation in rainfed, mountainous areas to address soil erosion and groundwater depletion. It will also finance high-efficiency irrigation systems using locally produced equipment and the provision of Laser Land Levelers to private operators in low-altitude plain areas. Cash for work transfers and unconditional cash transfers for women, if women are not allowed to work remain unchanged from the first additional financing of the project.Component 3: Promote Commercialization of Farmers. This new component builds on previous investments to enhance value addition, income, and market access for smallholder producers and their enterprises. In partnership with key value chain actors, the Second Additional Financing will finance investments to improve the capacity of smallholder producers (20 percent women) and agriculture MSMEs (30 percent female-owned) to connect to established commodity supply chains by adopting climate-smart production and value addition technologies.Component 4: Implementation Support. Additional allocation is proposed under this component to support direct and in-direct cost of project management and M&E for the additional activities proposed.