The government of Ethiopia and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) have signed the Participatory Agriculture and Climate Transformation (PACT) grant agreement to provide support to small-scale farmers in the country.

Development Diaries reports that the U.S.$106.54 million PACT grant is aimed at supporting rural households to sustainably improve their incomes and food and nutrition security.

Despite the positive trend and the economic progress achieved over the years, poverty and food insecurity, as well as decent employment remain a challenge due to multiple crises affecting the country.

The agriculture sector in Ethiopia, which accounts for about 45 percent of the country’s GDP and 90 percent of its exports, also provides employment to approximately 80 percent of the population.

However, recent climate shocks have increased the country’s vulnerability to food insecurity as small-scale farmers who produce the bulk of the country’s food depend on rainfall to grow their crops.

‘The grant comes at a critical time for the country, to build the resilience of smallholder farmers to multiple shocks and safeguard food and nutrition security’, IFAD’s Regional Director, East and Southern Africa Division, Sara Mbago-Bhunu, said in a statement.

‘This grant offers us the opportunity to build on IFAD’s previous work in the country to facilitate farmers’ access to rural finance, technologies and markets, and to scale up these interventions that have a multiplier effect on building resilience of food systems in Ethiopia’.

PACT, according to IFAD, will be implemented over a seven-year period and aims to reach 750,000 rural people in six regional states, with a focus on women, youth and people with disabilities.

Ethiopia is currently enduring the Horn of Africa’s worst drought in decades with five consecutive failed rainy seasons.

Source: IFAD

Photo source: World Bank