Agri climate resilience Oxfam in Vietnam and Spark Center for Social Entrepreneurship Development have been engaged in conceptualizing a Strengthen Resilience Options by Narrowing the Gaps (STRONG) for agribusiness in Vietnam that is the continual of the pilot activities which were implemented in 2015-2016.

The STRONG project aims at building resilience to disaster and climate risks for private agri-businesses and service providers for agricultural production and services, including insurance companies. The project will create impact on the sustainable livelihood for small-scale producers and processors as final beneficiaries.

The STRONG comprises of two phases: Pilot (Awakening) and Growing (Roll out). The focus of the pilot phase is on raising agribusiness awareness on climate resilience and developing their business resilience capacity while promoting inclusive business models to create benefits for both companies and smallholder farmers in their supply chain. Apart from working with SMEs and also microbusiness in the agriculture sector, the STRONG project in the period September 2016-March 2017 started identifying and working with interested institutions for providing support and services to SMEs in this regard. Specifically, it develops the capacity of interested individual and organizations in provinces that can provide support to SMEs in climate resilience as well as engaging with financial service providers, specifically TYM, a micro financial institution to review and improve their credit assessment and monitoring tools that can help their clients, being micro businesses and small producers to identify potential climate risks. Experience from STRONG project so far has shown that:

(i) Enforce SME practices for climate risk resilience in the agriculture needs adequate support structure at local level to deliver suitable services and support to SMEs such as mentoring, connecting to relevant actors. Important partners could be local research and agriculture promotion centres, social # political organizations such as women and/or youth unions, NGOs, both local and int#l ones, operating in the areas with private SMEs participation, etc.
(ii) Working with financial institutions on possible products and loan approval and monitoring tools for SME climate risk resilience could bring substantial benefits for service providers as well as their clients (SMEsand small holder farmers). However, it could take time to work with large commercial banks due to the complexity in its operation arrangement. Therefore, exploring and engaging with innovative financial institutions, which are eager to introduce new products/services are more effective.

(iii) Advocacy work for policy recommendations will be more effective once evidences from SMEs, service practices related to disaster and climate risk resilience gathered and analysed.  With government national program for natural disaster damage prevention and other int#l development initiative targeting climate change issues in the agriculture sector, such as programs conducted byDFAT and SNV, Asian Foundation, World Vision for example, there is a need to find channels to trigger high-level attention advocacy for the project. This will help creating more confidence and local supports for private sector to be creative in climate resilience while enhancing the livelihoods for smallholder farmers and processor.