The project’s goal is to contribute to improving the food and nutritional security, to reducing poverty and to increasing the resilience of poor rural people in Southern Mali to climate change. The development objective is the sustainable improvement of access to renewable energy sources and soil productivity. MERIT will promote the resilience of ecosystems toward climate change through the promotion of low emission energy sources. It will benefit over 42,000 households, or about 420,000 indirect beneficiaries in its intervention area, of which at least 50 per cent will be women and 30 per cent will be youth.
MERIT has two components:
Component 1. Promotion of the biodigester nexus. The project will promote an inclusive policy dialogue on renewable energies and biogas in particular, by supporting the creation of a multi stakeholder platform bringing together private and public stakeholders. Strategic studies and monitoring mechanisms will be developed to feed the platform with concrete information to inform the policy dialogue.
Component2. Resilience of production systems and integrated terroir management. MERIT will scale up the Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme/Projet d’Amélioration de la Productivité Agricole au Mali (ASAP/PAPAM) approach of communal adaptation plans, in line with the national agricultural policy framework. The creation of 150 Adaptation Community Plans (PCA) is planned and will be conducted according to a participatory and bottom up approach, from village level to communal level, ensuring the tailoring of adaptation measures to local specificities, and ensuring a better adoption of the interventions.
