Mozambique: Sustainable agricolture (2018 – 2020)

punto.sud has been awarded by ICEI the evaluation of the project ‘Fortalecimento para Organizações rurais REsilientes e Sistemas Territoriais Ecologicamente sustentáveis’ (Strengthening of the resilience of environmentally sustainable Rural Organizations and Territorial Systems) in Mozambique.

The project aims to implement an integrated production system that can reduce vulnerability to climate change in the Mocubela district (Mozambique), increasing and diversifying the productive agro-silvo-pastoral activities in order to improve soil conservation and the preservation of forests and mangroves, as a strategy to improve producers’ resilience and their ability to adapt. It will be possible to reduce the human pressure on natural resources for the maintenance of their role in climate change mitigation and ecosystem services provision.

The strategy is based on:

• Direct implementation of productive activities aimed at reducing carbon emissions by limiting the extension of the agricultural frontier at the expense of forest area (conservation agriculture and appropriate and sustainable technologies applied to agricultural practices).
• Activities aimed at improving the uptake of carbon for mitigating climate change (forest nurseries and mangrove), with SAF methodology (agroforestry systems), introducing appropriate technologies to improve efficiency in the use of wood for the production of coal and for domestic use (improved stoves).
• Activities aimed to improve the capacity of local actors (community members, officials and technicians of local authorities, Civil Society Organizations) in providing a rapid response to the effects of extreme events, in the analysis of economic valuation of natural resource and in the land use planning of the resources at a district level.

• to what extent the investment required of producing peasants (participation in training and organizational activities) will trigger innovative mechanisms capable of modifying the current production / consumption
• to guarantee a sufficient basis of study to verify the correctness of the proposal and the possible scalability of the results in the future.

To meet these objectives, the external evaluators will therefore have to guarantee:

• the verification of the “theory of change” of the project, especially as regards the component addressed to the producers.
• the definition of ad hoc monitoring tools (questionnaires, data bases) aimed at collecting quality data in relation to the actual change (knowledge, attitudes, behavior) of producers.
• the implementation of a field survey in the mid-project (or earlier) aimed at processing the collected data and verifying the development of the other project components taking care, in particular, to analyze the attention paid to the project by the local institutions and the perception of the female component about the results of the project.
• the implementation of a final evaluation with the aim of evaluating the efficiency of the implementation system adopted and the realization of the results achieved (effective implementation of the plan, estimated impact on beneficiaries, lessons learned, possible scalability).