Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation (HARITA) quarterly report: October 2010–December 2010

In its two years of delivery in five villages in Ethiopia, HARITA has shown promising results for replication. More than 1,300 households currently participate in HARITA, up from 200 in its first year. In large part, the success in uptake is due to a critical design element that allows the poorest farmers to pay for their insurance premiums through their labor. In 2011, HARITA will scale up to serve 15,000 households, achieving the critical mass necessary for commercial viability. This success led, at the end of 2010, to Oxfam America and the World Food Programme (WFP) reaching an agreement to launch a joint five-year rural resilience program modeled on HARITA in additional regions of Ethiopia and three other countries. The partnership is called the Rural Resilience Initiative, or R4 (referring to risk reduction, prudent risk taking, risk transfer, and risk reserve). Announced at the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference by Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam International, and Sheila Sisulu, WFP deputy executive director for hunger solutions, R4 promises to leverage the respective strengths of Oxfam and the WFP: Oxfam’s capacity to build innovative partnerships and the WFP’s long history of supporting state run safety nets for poor farmers. This partnership will enable poor, smallholder farmers to adapt to climate change through an affordable, comprehensive risk management program: improved resource management (risk reduction), microinsurance (risk transfer), microcredit (prudent risk
taking), and savings (risk reserves).