The R4 rural resilience initiative

With an aim of building long-term resilience to climate change for food and income security, the World Food Programme (WFP) and Oxfam have successfully implemented a programme called 'The R4 Rural Resilience Initiative' in Senegal and Ethiopia. The initiative has four risk management strategies viz. improved resource management through asset creation (risk reduction), insurance (risk transfer), livelihoods diversification and microcredit (prudent risk taking) and savings (risk reserves). One of the key features of R4 is bringing small farmers within agricultural insurance scheme by enabling the poorest farmers in Senegal and Ethiopia to pay for crop insurance with their own labour. Protected by agricultural insurance, farming families facing a drought or other shock no longer find themselves forced into desperate measures, such as selling their farm animals or taking their children out of school.

In Bangladesh, small and landless farmers could be brought under agricultural insurance through implementing R4 strategies, I think their overall socio-economic condition will improve and they will be better prepared to face the climate change disasters.

Professor M Zahidul Haque
Department of Agricultural Extension & Information System
SAU, Dhaka