Decentralised Climate Funds DCF BRACED aims to create more effective climate adaptation planning and finance by local governments in Mali and Senegal, which will improve communities’ resilience to climate change. In partnership with national and local governments, the project will pilot six devolved decision-making and funding mechanisms  in four Départements and three Cercles in Senegal and Mali, respectively, to fund community-prioritized, public good investments that directly build the resilience of 750,000 local people to climate variability and extreme events. The pilot will deliver national policy  and improve readiness of local government to draw down, and national government to disburse, global climate finance in support of local adaptation. In Mali and Senegal, climate extremes manifest in droughts, floods and, in Senegal, wildfires. Climate data analysis indicates increases in total rainfall in Mopti (Mali) and Koungheul (Senegal) from mid 90s to present, with “no trend” at nearby stations of Douentza (Mali) and Kaffrine (Senegal), although rainfall records there are incomplete. Maximum temperatures are on an upward trend, and minimum temperatures are also increasing. Extreme variability from year to year is still the norm, which makes long-term climate trends difficult to establish statistically. Climate remains characterized by great inter-annual and rainy season variability, including late onset and/or early termination of rains, significant gaps between ‘useful’ rainy days, and violent late-season storms.

Climate extremes challenge the ability of vulnerable people to prosper and, in some cases, to survive. In 2011, for example, rainfall in Mali was 40% less than the 10-year average, resulting in low crop production and leaving 60% of households dependent on humanitarian food aid. Flash floods after heavy rainfall, such as those in Kaffrine in 2013, displace people, put them at risk for physical harm, flood productive areas and destroy crops and infrastructure. In Kaffrine, wildfires are a recurrent and increasingly frequent phenomena, causing significant damage to dry season grazing, stored crops and vegetative cover, and damaging the capacity for soil regeneration. 

For targeted areas, climate change is expected to yield further increase in temperature, increased frequency and severity of drought and increasingly unpredictable and frequent floods. These effects are expected to have major impacts on food security for rural populations.  

In the Mopti Region (Mali), 98% of the population are farmers and agro-pastoralists. In the wetlands of the Cercle of Mopti, households combine irrigated and flood-recession family farming with some commercial agriculture, pastoralism and fishing. In the semi-arid and arid Cercles of Koro and Douentza and the Kaffrine Region (Senegal), production systems rely on rainfed cultivation, some irrigation, pastoralism, forestry and seasonal migration. Unpredictable rainfall, combined with periodic drought, undermines crop productivity and pasture regeneration, placing longer-term pressure on tree resources as poor households harvest wood and non-timber forest products (NTFP) to survive. Impacts on trees and shrubs adversely affect women and girls, who are responsible for collection of firewood and NTFP. For fishing communities, low water levels and dried up riverbeds reduce fish production. Transhumant herders find it difficult to maintain seasonal rights to grazing and passage on grasslands and floodplain pastures, which are increasingly occupied by expanding cultivation. 

Successive years of low agricultural or pastoral productivity due to erratic rainfall patterns and drought erode communities’ asset base (e.g.. livestock, cereal stores) thereby undermining their short-term food security and longer-term capacity to cope with climate extremes and rebuild sustainable livelihoods in years of improved rainfall. Chronic malnutrition affects 32.3% of the population in the Mopti region (Mali) and 24% in Kaffrine region (Senegal). To cope with reduced income from cash crops and commercial ventures, agro-pastoralists increasingly turn to labor migration to diversify their livelihood portfolios. 

Food and income insecurity in the targeted areas impacts women and girls more intensely than men. Women and youth, who are socially and politically marginalized, are particularly vulnerable to climate extremes because of unequal access to common resources. Women are typically responsible for ensuring family food security but lack control over assets and agricultural inputs. Intra-household food allocations mean that during shortages, women and girls generally eat last, receive less food with lower nutritional value. Women are responsible for collecting water and firewood for cooking, but dwindling ground water and scarce surface water resources mean that women must travel greater distances to find water or use less water for basic hygiene and sanitation. Access to deep (pumped) wells may require unaffordable payments to Water User Associations. When men migrate to find work, women and children left behind may experience increased burdens and income/food insecurity, but these impacts are not well documented – the implications of migration on households will be included in the resilience assessments undertaken at the beginning of the project. The project will produce four outputs through a number of activities:

Output 1: Vulnerable communities in three Cercles (Mali) and four Départements (Senegal) benefit from public good investments that build resilience. 
(A) Convene multi-stakeholder meetings in each Cercle/Département to build common project vision.
(B) Establish climate Adaptation Planning Committees at the Commune/CR level to prioritize investments in public goods aimed at strengthening local adaptation and resilience and, once awarded, implement projects, and at the Cercle/Département level to provide oversight on CAPC proposals for resilience investments.
(C) Build local government capacity on climate change science, policy and implications for local economies/ecosystems; participatory budgeting that prioritizes women and children; conducting resilience assessments; risk management; and managing and monitoring projects.
(D) Conduct Resilience Assessments (RA) to assess vulnerability, stresses and local adaptation strategies and capacities (differentiated by livelihood group, age and gender, with an emphasis on risks specific to women and children). CAPCs will conduct RAs with support from local government planners and project staff. 
(E) Radio broadcasts to disseminate climate information and promote participation in project activities and government planning. 

Output 2: Devolved finance and planning mechanisms are established and functional in three Cercles (Mali) and four départements (Senegal) to support community-prioritized investments in public goods that build climate resilience.
(A) Mainstream socially inclusive resilience planning into existing systems
(B) Expand Climate Information Services (CIS). CIS will be extended to Mopti and Kaffrine regions through a multi-stakeholder platform, linked to existing national systems.
(C) Establish six Climate Adaptation Funds. Three CAFs (£500,000 each) will be established in each country. In Mali, each Cercle will have a CAF. In Senegal, two CAFs will be inter-municipal and a third fund, competitive among the 4 Départements, will be managed by a RAPC. 
In Years 1 and 2, NEF/IED-Afrique will co-manage CAFs to ensure oversight and accountability. In Year 3, control over CAFs will pass fully to local governments.
(D) Ensure capacity of adaptation planning committees to manage funds. CAFs will conform to public finance policy and law, have the necessary fiduciary controls to ensure value for money and accountability, and complement local government development budgets. An auditing company will train CAPC, APC, and RAPCs.

Output 3: Evidence and learning on the effectiveness of decentralized climate finance investments to improve communities’ resilience is generated and disseminated.
(A) Generate project learning through action research. Studies will include RAs, effectiveness of local government planning in building resilience, and economic profiles of each Cercle/Département. Learning will focus on project experience with devolved funding, tools that enable existing planning systems to identify public-good resilience investments, and the contribution of adaptation to delivering more resilient livelihoods and economies. The project will also support Cercle/Départements to design a research agenda, enabling them to commission research that supports planning and investments for climate resilient growth and development.
(B) Develop local capacity for monitoring and evaluation. In addition to project M&E, the project will build the capacity of local government to monitor and evaluate resilience (building on RAs, Activity 1.1.4). The M&E system will be designed to track BRACED and appropriate TAMD indicators.

Output 4: Mechanisms and processes established for national governments to engage with locally generated evidence. The people of Mali’s Mopti Region and Senegal’s Kaffrine Region are vulnerable to climate extremes because of their strong dependence on natural resources, poor development infrastructure and the limited institutional, technological and financial capacity of local governments to manage climatic shocks and stresses and to support local adaptive strategies. 

Local governments in Mali and Senegal have limited capacity to build resilience to climate stresses. Existing centralized planning mechanisms (a) are inflexible, top-down, and fragmented across sectors, (b) evidence poor understanding of local coping strategies, (c) reflect limited use of climate information to ensure ‘climate smart’ investments and (d) poorly integrate sustainable development planning with DRR or climate risk management. Further, despite strong evidence that resilient productivity and adaptability are part of rural communities’ livelihoods and institutions, stronger political and economic interests have captured planning systems that do not adequately reflect community adaptation strategies. Policy development through participatory action and learning with key stakeholders is a cornerstone of project design and sustainability. The project will pursue a multi-pronged strategy with communities and national and local governments to share changes that increase their capacity to build resilience to climate extremes through the CAFs. 

The project seeks to build local ownership and national acceptance of decentralized CAF mechanisms so that they become institutionalized and used widely. By focusing on institutional development and strengthening local capacity, the project will ensure that financing mechanisms can function independently of BRACED in the future. The project will foster buy-in for change by demonstrating that empowered local leadership is central to effective adaptation and resilience investments over time and that viable approaches exist for this approach at scale. 

The project will deliver on key national climate change and development policy objectives by introducing reforms that work through and strengthen, rather than replace, existing government systems consistent with national policy and legislation. Two pillars of this strategy are (i) working with and through local governments to identify policy and institutional changes required to build resilience to climate extremes, and (ii) closely engaging AEDD and CSE in the project. 

Seconding project staff to local governments and providing training and technical support to government staff will further build local capacity for continued implementation. This principle has also been followed during the PDG phase, when relevant policy stakeholders were actively involved in the design and leaning process. 

Through this participatory action-learning process, we expect to generate lessons around: (1) institutional linkages and financial transfer mechanisms from global funds to local decentralized government; (2) decentralized governments’ ability to program inclusive investments for climate adaptation in favor of vulnerable groups (especially women and children); (3) accountability, transparency and effectiveness in delivering adaptation investments locally; and (4) the nature and effectiveness of resilience investments that provide enhanced value for money. These lessons will be important to ensure replicability by government (not project-based) systems in Mali and Senegal as well as in other arid/semi-arid environments. Improved resilience to climate change will be accomplished through achievement of the following objectives:
(1) Investment in local, community-prioritized adaptation; 
(2) Improved climate resilience planning, including use of climate information; 
(3) Improved local government capacity to distribute devolved climate financing; 
(4) Encouraging national governments to adopt reforms that are supportive of local resilience. The project will reach 750,000 people through CAF-funded resilience projects – approximately 250,000 in Senegal and 500,000 in Mali. Through the CAF, we expect to fund approximately 75 projects reaching an average of 10,000 people per project. Tis equals 50% of the total population in the targeted areas.

Target communities in Mali and Senegal were selected based on their exposure to climate extremes, chronic food deficits, high levels of poverty, and territorial connectivity and variation in ecological zones to facilitate collaboration and learning on natural resource management between communes/CR. Additionally, partners have long-established relationships in these communities, providing a foundation of knowledge, trust and credibility that will facilitate beneficiary participation and successful project implementation.

In Mali, NEF will work in 24 communes in Mopti Region, in the three Cercles of Douentza, Koro, and Mopti. The poverty rate is 72% in these Cercles. Agro-pastoralists and farmers (98% of the population) practice a combination of irrigated and flood recession farming, rainfed millet farming, pastoralism, fishing, and agroforestry. In Senegal, IED-Afrique will work in Kaffrine Region, in the four Départements of Kaffrine, Koungheul, Maleme Hoddar, and Birkilane, which include 28 CRs. The region’s poverty rate (63.8%) is significantly higher than the national average (47.6%). Rainfed agriculture, spring-fed crop irrigation, pastoralism, agroforestry and seasonal migration dominate local economic activity.