Climate Adaptation Grants - SGP
- Ashu Sikri (Unlicensed)
This is one in a series of ideas for financing sources which could be a galvanizing offering for farmer group digitization.
Mar 11 Update:
Received this summary of central and state level schemes (in AP and Odisha) relevant for FPOs and for farmer member households.
Thanks to Rikin for pointing out Farmrise which operates in the US and simplifies the process for farmers to access grant programs like Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and Value Add producer Grants (VAPG) from the USDA. See more here.
There are a bunch of government schemes specifically tailored to FPOs. Haqdarshak organizes info on these schemes and makes it available via an API which could be quite useful if we pursue this track. A couple references
API spec:
Central schemes relevant for FPOs
A grant is compelling relative to debt for obvious reasons.
One theme that could be compelling is climate adaptation grants.
One program that was identified as part of our climate research is this Smallholder Grant Programs under GEF. They provide grants to officially registered Community Based Organisations (CBOs) or NGOs and the maximum grant is $50,000. It’s not clear if SHGs or FPOs would fall qualify as a CBO or if there is flexibility in expanding eligibility.
More on the facility in India:
The GEF Small Grants Programme is a corporate programme of the Global Environment Facility (GEF). GEF has over 22,000 projects in 127 countries. As an aftermath of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, GEF Small Grant Programme was launched.
SGP India has been recognized as one of the upgraded country programmes. As an upgraded country programme, SGP India supports vulnerable communities through people-led approaches towards environmental conservation and livelihood enhancement with special focus on thematic areas such as Biodiversity, Climate Change, Land Degradation, International Waters and Persistent Organic Pollutants.
SGP India is being implemented by UNDP in partnership with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. The Centre for Environment Education acts as the National Host Institution (NHI) and has been coordinating and facilitating SGP in India since 2000.
443 community based action projects have been supported by SGP. The grants are given to Community Based Organizations and NGO’s for promoting innovation led rural programme that are connected to environment and energy conservation, poverty alleviation, sustainable livelihood, gender mainstreaming and inclusive community empowerment. Till date SGP benefits have reached to more than 600,000 people across India.
From BCG: “The vast majority of adaptation financing goes to implementing organisations who then work with farmers, very little goes directly to farmers. The main challenges for funders is to vet applicants, ensuring that they are real and use the financing for what was requested so they have onerous reporting requirements that are difficult for farmers to complete accurately. It is easier to deal with a larger organisation that then does the work on the ground.”
The premise is could we streamline the process for FPO or SHGs to access grant financing under such a program (the IFAD ASAP program is another possibility).
In addition to support in completing the grant application (which we could partially match with our own funding as well) is an interface which includes a cropping calendar to access relevant advisory in a timely fashion (showcasing the practices which are pertinent to whatever is being proposed in the grant) and a basic farm diary to record practices. We could layer in the Kisan Coin idea to gamify this bit.
While it may not be super interesting to farmers initially, the data would be held not by DG but a “data trust” or “data cooperative” where DG plays a steward role (until there is greater farmer ownership). We can then identify ways to leverage this farm activity data for additional use cases.