Mali Drylands Development Project

The development objective of the Drylands Development Project for Mali is to improve agricultural productivity and strengthen resilience of rural households living in the targeted dryland areas. The project comprises of three components. The first component, improving the productivity and resilience of beneficiary populations objectives are to: (a) enhance household resilience by providing combined interventions to poor and vulnerable households to raise their consumption and to cope with seasonal shocks, and providing them with opportunities to achieve sustained improvement in their living conditions; and (b) increase agricultural productivity of farmers and groups of farmers. It consists of following sub-components: (i) expansion of the social registry; (ii) direct cash and productive transfers; and (iii) promotion of emerging high-value crops value chains. The second component, productive infrastructure at the community level will support investments in community infrastructure that will aim at improving the environmental, physical, and socioeconomic context for dryland agriculture, and create synergies with activities to boost agricultural productivity and strengthen resilience under component one. It consists of following sub-components: (i) selection and preparation of investments; (ii) productive infrastructure investments; and (iii) commercialization investments. The third component, institutional support, crisis management, and project coordination aims at improving the skills of local- and national-level policy makers involved in agricultural policy and planning formulation, and providing support for agricultural policy development in line with the project development objective (PDO). It consists of following sub-components: (i) creating capacity for evidence-based agricultural policy analysis; (ii) contingency emergency response; and (iii) project coordination.