HARITA progress report: Jan 2010 - Jun 2010

The climate change rural-resiliency project launched in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia by Oxfam America and its local and international partners has entered year two of its pilot. Known as HARITA—Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation—the project aims to address the needs of smallholder farmers facing climate change shocks by offering a robust risk management package that integrates disaster risk reduction, affordable risk transfer, and prudent risk-taking.

In its second year, HARITA is being offered in five villages spread across the region, as part of an effort to gather a significant pool of data on climatic variation in Tigray in preparation for a region-wide scale-up. The project—which offers insurance-for-work for activities intended to reduce farmers’ vulnerability to droughts—operates in conjunction with the Ethiopian government’s existing social safety net program to make insurance more affordable for the rural smallholders it serves. This report highlights the results of the second year of its pilot as of June 2010.