African Development Fund commits $14 million grant to scaling up climate resilience across the Sahel

The grant aims to strengthen the adaptation and resilience capacities of communities across the Sahel as they face increasingly severe climate extremes. The project adopts a dual approach: scaling up the “climate-smart villages” model around hydro-agricultural infrastructure, and improving access to and use of climate information for decision-making.

The new funding will support the regional seed system by disseminating resilient, high-yielding improved seed varieties. Planned activities include updating the Regional Catalogue of Species and Varieties; creating a business-to-business networking portal; and strengthening seed multiplication capacities of national agricultural research systems and seed companies to ensure availability in climate-smart villages. The project will also support women’s and youth empowerment through targeted capacity-building.

In addition, the project will reinforce climate data collection and impact monitoring systems, enhancing real-time data availability from observation networks. It will establish an integrated digital platform for data collection, management, and real-time dissemination, as well as a regional system for monitoring and managing loss and damage data. This includes standardising loss and damage reporting across countries and developing a multi-scale digital platform for the centralised data management.

The Climate Action Window grant will cover 30 municipalities and support the creation of 60 climate-smart villages across Sahelian countries, helping to strengthen community resilience to climate shocks.