ACIS - Agro-climate Information Services

ACIS will enable women farmers, ethnic minority farmers, and agricultural planners, in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, to better anticipate and respond to risks and opportunities from changes in the weather, through participatory and equitable agro-climate information services.

Background

Over 70 percent of the populations of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos live in rural areas. Harsh climatic conditions, which are further aggravated by climate change, teamed with poor infrastructure, and restrict farming systems and market opportunities. For women and ethnic minority smallholders, the resilience of their livelihoods is often especially restricted by limited resources, inadequate access to information and channels, social, cultural, and language barriers, and constrained participation in decision-making at various levels.

Objective of ACIS

Key outcome

By integrating scientific and local knowledge, a scientifically robust institutional and community-based ACIS system will be developed and tested in 3 countries, ready for scaling up.
Women and Ethnic Minority farmers will have the capacity to understand, demand, and seek agro-climate information. Farmers will develop informed plans that will reduce climate-induced crop failure.
Strong research capacity and evidence will be built, including analysis of the efficacy and viability of ACIS, institutional and policy gaps, and the tracking of gender and equity integration into ACIS.
Next-users, such as local authorities, will have access to tailored agro-climatic information and will be able to communicate effectively with ethnic minorities and women farmers.
Local government bodies, private partners, and local CSOS will be invested in and capable of further developing ACIS at the policy level and within the private sector.

How does ACIS work?

The ACIS for Women and Ethnic Minority Famers in South-East Asia project takes a phased learning and implementation approach, to ensure long-term impact; strong foundations are laid from the outset, and learning and adaptation continue throughout.

KNOWLEDGE GENERATION PLATFORM: The knowledge generation platform will work throughout the project to: identify research and policy gaps for ACIS implementation; monitor and evaluate the project; and communicate the learning outcomes and subsequent recommendations from the project, for the purposes of policy dialogue.
ACTION-ORIENTED CAPACITY BUILDING: Various capacity-building methods are conducted with local authorities, CSOs, scientific institutions, the media, and farmers, through Farmer Learning Networks and Gender Champions. Methods integrate technical topics and facilitation and community engagement skills, with particular attention to advisory development, women’s empowerment, and engaging-with-men strategies.
AGRO-CLIMATE ADVISORIES: Agro-climate zoning is the basis for institutional-level ACIS for each area, developed via participatory approaches. Local knowledge is actively contributed by gender champions, representing the farmers.
Through learning and feedback loops, agricultural planners and farmers work together to develop and communicate seasonal forecasts and advisories for each zone, linking local and scientific knowledge.
FARMER LEARNING NETWORKS: Gender Champions are selected from existing farmer groups to form a farmer learning network at the agro-climate zone level, playing an important role in knowledge and skill transfer.
Through various social learning processes and action planning, gender champions work with the farmers and agricultural planners to apply and improve the advisories.
POLICY DIALOGUE FOR SCALING ACIS: At the start of the project, project partners and public institutional ACIS stakeholders jointly agree on a sustainability and scaling strategy, to ensure that the project works towards these long-term goals.
The evidence from the knowledge generation platform is used in ongoing policy dialogue with stakeholders, to ensure both public and private buy-in to equitable ACIS, which is scaled nationally and regionally.

Participants of ACIS

Agricultural planners and smallholder farmers, with a focus on ethnic minority groups and women.