Northeast Ethiopia and, more especially the Wollo province, is repeatedly hit by droughts, worsening the vulnerability of people to food insecurity. Sorghum, an orphan crop, is the main food crop in the area, and despite its relative tolerance to drought, the severity and frequency of droughts have become detrimental to the crop. There is a need to diversify the farming system to reduce the dependence of farmers on one crop, and thus reduce their vulnerability. Therefore, the main objective of this project is to diversify the farming system with drought-tolerant crops, enset and chickpea, to enhance the resilience of farming communities to climate change-related food insecurity. Enset, commonly called false banana, is also an orphan crop, tolerant to drought and floods, but grown in the target area for non-food purposes. As orphan crops are less cultivated and researched, the project works on two aspects:
(i) scale the cultivation of these crops in the target region, including enhancing the capacity of farmers to use climate-smart farming practices to sustain crop productivity.
(ii) enable researchers to accelerate the breeding of crop varieties that are more resilient to climate change, by closing the technology gap in the use of molecular approaches for the breeding and the selection of desirable varieties of orphan crops like sorghum and enset.