In three regions across Burkina Faso, communities are taking the lead in finding solutions to adapt and build their resilience to the impacts of climate change, with performance-based climate resilience grants from the UN Capital Development Fund. Investments in rice-growing, high-value and nutritious vegetables and smart agriculture techniques are being coupled with improved access to water, bolstering livelihoods in this landlocked nation where soaring temperatures and erratic rainfalls are fuelling desertification and drought.

The UNCDF designed the Local Climate Adaptive Living Facility (LoCAL) to help strengthen the resilience of vulnerable communities such as Saponé in the Centre-Sud Region, Loumbila in the Plateau-Central Region and Pabré in the Centre Region of Burkina Faso. Their residents are now among the 18 million people worldwide to have seen the positive returns from locally conceived adaptation investments with LoCAL, which applies the use of performance based grants.

"The maintenance and development of the rice-growing lowland meets our needs by helping to restore the soil and facilitating rice cultivation,” said Mrs Kibsa Ilboudo, a member of the Saponé community who is already looking ahead to the benefits of future grants, “we would like support from LoCAL to have a borehole to grow off-season crops."

In Burkina Faso, LoCAL empowers communes to implement climate change adaptation actions according to their own priorities and in line with national strategies. LoCAL's performance-based climate resilience grants (PBCRGs), channeled to local governments through the national fiscal transfer system, enabled the three pilot communes to implement investments that had been identified through public consultations where residents selected how best to tackle climate change in their communities.

After a year of deployment of the LoCAL mechanism, a performance review conducted earlier this year found significant headway in project implementation along with strong community level ownership. The purpose of this evaluation was to confirm the minimum requirements for access to the mechanism had been met and assess the performance of each commune in line with the standard PBCRG implementation approach, also available as ISO 14093:2022. The results will be used to calculate the amount of subsidies to be allocated in the next cycle.

The better the implementation results, the larger the second grant allocation, thus encouraging improved performance. The review is also an opportunity to determine any need for technical and capacity-building support as part of the second investment cycle.

In all three communes, communities have successfully undertaken activities essential to community resilience. In Saponé and Loumbila, the communities decided to create irrigated gardens for the express purpose of producing nutritional vegetables and crops for their own consumption. While in Pabré, residents elected to establish irrigated market-gardens for growing high-value vegetables that they plan to sell on local markets to boost incomes.

Also in Saponé, the community has undertaken work to rehabilitate rice-growing areas.

Communities coupled these projects with investments in access to water, including construction of wells and installation of solar pumps. The communities also benefitted from capacity-building activities in resilient agriculture and natural resource management.

In Loumbila, for example, members of the cooperative in charge of managing the nutrition garden have begun planting resilient and native Moringa and Baobab seedlings using climate-smart agriculture techniques. Resistant to drought and tolerant of poor soils, Moringa and Boabab trees can also be eaten to supplement diets with important vitamins and minerals.

Cooperative members told UNCDF representatives undertaking the assessment that they feel that LoCAL's investments are meeting the commune's needs. Successful implementation and results now pave the way for a second grant allocation, to be disbursed later this year.

Investments in Burkina Faso were made possible with the support of the Government of Denmark, which has provided over US$ 7 million in funds to LoCAL activities across Africa. A member of the Danish Embassy accompanied UNCDF to visit project sites earlier this year.

"I find the dynamics very good, considering the amounts of funding received,” said Sara Svalgaard, First Secretary of the Danish Embassy in Ouagadougou, who took part in the visit to Pabré. “I like the level of realization of the investments underway, which are benefiting the communities".

Article and photos: Koudtanga Jean Marie National Coordinator, UNCDF Burkina Faso 2024.

Special Thanks: We would like to thank the Embassy of the Kingdom of Denmark in Burkina Faso, the Fonds d'Intervention pour l'Environnement (FIE), the Direction Générale des Collectivités Territoriales (DGCT), the Direction Générale du Développement Territoriale (DGDT) and the team of consultants involved in this first annual review for their active participation. Bravo to the communes of Saponé, Pabré and Loumbila for their hard work!

Find out more about LoCAL here

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