The Sustainable Food Lab has worked with the beverage company AB InBev and its Uganda subsidiary Nile Breweries to explore ways to increase the resilience of small-scale grain farmers to the effects of climate change. The Food Lab is happy to share a case study on Improving Grain Sector Climate-Smart Awareness and Decision-Making, documenting the process and results of the pilot with Nile Breweries Limited.
Seeking to improve their supply chains of sorghum and barley through local sourcing and sustainability commitments, Nile Breweries Limited leveraged the Guide to Assessing Climate Resilience in Smallholder Supply Chains to further understand their climate risks and the possible interventions available to build resilience to climate change.
Working with on the ground partner TechnoServe, in collaboration with IITA and the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO), and by harnessing CIAT’s climate suitability maps, the pilot provided AB InBev with tools that showed financial implications of inaction and illustrated steps to take action against climate change.
As a learning partner in the USAID Supply Chain Resilience Learning Community, the Food Lab also highlights the challenge that private sector actors like AB InBev face when justifying the allocation of internal resources to combat climate change and the overall complexity of working with smallholder farmers. By creating lessons that were useful but simple, the Food Lab and TechnoServe were able to create a better understanding of the need for climate investments. According to AB InBev Agro Manager, Theunis Coetzee, the value of the pilot was “mostly to confirm perceptions – having it quantified and written enables [me] to make the case for resources because it is better for swaying decision-makers”. From this project, Nile Breweries Limited has proposed a number of projects to improve farmer resilience and continue to provide value throughout their supply chain.
This project was part of the USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience. You can learn more about the Food Lab’s involvement in climate smart agriculture here. To learn more about AB inBev and their sustainability efforts, visit their website. And to explore TechnoServe’s projects worldwide visit technoserve.org.
