*5.1.7 Progressive complex alliances*

Progressive complex alliances (*center triangle*) represent a difficult to achieve form of stakeholder partnership that effectively balances the interests of rural communities and the private and public sectors. In many cases, the loans from development banks are focused on combined actions involving these stakeholders through their combined participation and investment, although formula for success remains ambiguous as it involves complex, knowledge-rich problem-solving across competing interests and site-specific settings.

#### **5.2 Sector interactions**

Successful partnership within rural development programs striving for agricultural transformation, particularly within the realm of progressive complex alliances, requires effective communications between sectors (**Figure 2**). Between farming communities and the public sector, these communications involve advocacy on behalf of agricultural producers and their workers, and effective response from agricultural extension services. This dual mechanism ensures that public investment in advisory services is demand-driven. Unfortunately, rural communities often find it difficult to express their needs, and those that do so on their behalf may behave opportunistically. At the same time, public agricultural extension services are too often understaffed and underresourced, yet it is this communication that can lead to more efficient performance by extension specialists and project designers.

Communication between farming communities and the private sector is more direct. Businesses stream input products through agrodealer networks to farming communities and later purchase their surpluses through buyers. Accompanying these input products is information about them that is intended to achieve or maintain various competitive advantages. Farmer feedback on the availability, efficacy, and affordability of these input products is mainly felt in terms of seasonal purchases. At the same time, businesses seek direct feedback from potential customers to guide their selection of product lines and advertising campaigns. One difficulty in this dual mechanism is the inability of poorer farmers to purchase the full suite of

**Figure 2.**

*Key interactions between the public, private, and farming sectors that relate to the design and implementation of rural development projects.*

recommended input products proven to maximize their production. There is also the risk that unless accompanying technologies are properly bundled, the returns to any one technology may be disappointing. This communication mechanism can lead to alliances between farmers and businesses in terms of bulk purchase of production inputs and better coordinated marketing of produce.

Interactions between the private and public sector are focused on regulatory approval of products and steering financial incentives, often in ways designed to maximize profits or taxation and that often bypass farming communities. Nonetheless, the opportunities for co-investment into modernizing technologies through these dealings are enormous and can lead to the formulation of needed public-private partnerships that indirectly benefit farmers. One risk of this dialog, however, is where haphazard or opportunistic privatization may result in parastatal inefficiencies being replaced with private sector excesses.

Clearly, the optimal situation is where tripartite communication leads to the design and successful implementation of rural development projects that engage and benefit all three parties: rural communities, the private sector, and government (**Figure 2**). These complex alliances require problem-solving with clear agreement of which difficulties exist, how to merge possible solutions within everyone's best interests, and how different options most appealing to those different interests may be blended or pursued simultaneously. From the programmatic perspective, it is also important to establish how resulting activities may be accurately and continuously monitored within the context of contingencies and corrective adjustment. This level of communication as it relates to the deployment of modernizing agricultural technologies in Africa has proven to be no easy matter.

*Blending Climate Action and Rural Development in Africa's Sahel DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.103817*

**Figure 3.**

*Selected climate-smart technologies important to the Sahel as positioned within the Agricultural Transformation Triangle.*

#### **5.3 An example from the Sahel**

Technologies may be positioned within the agricultural transformation triangle assuming that the relative importance of the three different drivers can be assigned (**Figure 3**). This positioning is based on the relative importance of each driver in the deployment of technologies and development outcomes, recognizing that all of them must ultimately be acceptable to rural households to become widely adopted, whether as technology customers or management practitioners. This approach, applied to the 17 technologies appearing in **Table 1**, results in clusters of technologies including those that are mainly achieved through grassroots efforts (upper center), or by private sector investment (lower left). Note that the positioning of new cereal varieties depends largely on whether they are hybridized or open pollinated, as the latter allows for communitybased and farmers-own seed production. Also note that systems-level changes (e.g. containment of insect invasions, elimination of *Striga*, agroforestry parkland establishment) require greater involvement of the public sector. One advantage of this approach is that technologies appearing in different clusters and within realms (see **Figure 1**) can be considered mutual objectives within a program's operational framework.

### **6. Investment volumes**

Substantial if not ample investment in the agriculture of the Sahel occurs (**Table 5**). Researchers at the Policy Analysis and Research Group at of Evans


**Table 5.**

*Annual investment in African agriculture and natural resource management by three major International Financial Institutions: The African Development Bank, The World Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (based on EPAR1 ).*

School of Public Policy and Governance (University of Washington) recently compiled data from three major International Financial Institutions (The World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development) to provide insights into the "Investment Landscape" in Africa [40]. The database contains all investments in 46 sub-Saharan African countries from the three IFIs as of May 2021 and includes "active" or "implementation" projects, loans, grants, or other financial investments [40]. To make funding by country more comparable, investments were annualized by dividing the total financial commitment per project by the number of years of implementation. Codes were applied that allowed summation for Sahelian countries including Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and South Sudan, but not those with a small portion falling within the Sahel (e.g. Benin, Cameroon, and Nigeria). Annual investment in agricultural development across all of sub-Saharan Africa totaled US \$6.24 billion in 2019, with 11% of it (=\$0.68 billion) directed to the Sahel. This amount is proportionate in terms of population (±0.3%) and represents 20.1% of total IFI investment. Considering the importance of agriculture in the Sahel, this percentage seems somewhat low.

Overall, the per capita annual investment from the three IFS in the Sahel zone is about \$30. What can be done with this resource and how may it best be leveraged toward greater benefit? **Table 3** suggests that the cost of modernizing Sahelian farming is about \$136 per ha, so these funds are only sufficient for improved production on only 0.22 ha on a household basis. This intervention results in an additional 288 kg food production and revenues worth \$73. These modest gains can lead to substantial improvement in lives. If 50% of the funds earmarked to smallholder agriculture in the Sahel (about \$295 million, calculated from **Table 5**) was directed to the delivery of TAAT cereal technologies, this is sufficient to "jump start" improved production across 2.17 million ha (calculated from **Tables 3** and **5**) resulting in 2.8 million additional tons of cereal and profits of over \$560 million per year from improved agriculture. A similar analysis may be performed based on funds directed to cultivated lands rather than households (**Table 5**). About \$16.30 per ha is invested by IFIs in the Sahel, considerably less than the average across sub-Saharan Africa. This level of

investment is sufficient to modernize production on 0.34 ha, producing about 445 kg of additional cereal, leading to a huge improvement in food security (calculated from **Tables 3** and **5**).

These same gains would lead to an estimated additional 3.3 million MT of sequestered CO2e across the Sahel worth \$71 million (calculated from **Table 4**), assuming that buyers for that offset due to climate adaptation can be found. One complication, however, is that the costs of directly quantifying carbon offsets on a smallholder farm may well be greater than the value of those offsets themselves (\$33 calculated from **Table 4**). Clearly, potential exists for combined agricultural development and climate action given the current level of development investment, and the challenge is to better realize these gains so that even more investment will follow.
