Co-producing Gender-responsive Climate Services for Enhanced Food and Nutrition Security and Health in Ethiopia and Tanzania

COGENT represents an inter-disciplinary approach to improving household food security and nutrition-related health outcomes among women and children in the face of climate change in selected areas of Ethiopia and Tanzania. Over the past decades, growing investments have been made in developing climate services that can reduce societal vulnerabilities and enhance adaptation and resilience to the impacts of climate variability and change. Yet the development of climate services, in Africa and elsewhere, rests on several assumptions. First, that providing more and better climate information will enhance the uptake of this information into decision-making. Second, that the application of climate services will lead to improved development outcomes. While a growing body of research documents the potential for climate services to improve local livelihoods and climate risk management strategies, considerable knowledge and capacity gaps continue to hinder the co-production, communication and uptake of socially equitable and gender-responsive climate services, undermining their potential impact. COGENT will advance understanding of the key mechanisms that facilitate the co-production of usable climate information in two African case studies, with the potential to improve the quality of climate services across other African contexts. Working together with local climate service practitioners in Ethiopia and Tanzania, we will generate knowledge that can help to address critical social, technical and institutional aspects that currently limit the co-production of usable and actionable climate services by men and women farmers in the two countries. The project aims to strengthen the long-term capacities of local institutions to undertake high-quality, policy-relevant research, while simultaneously building new interdisciplinary networks and collaborative experience and expertise within the climate research community in Norway.