LEAP in Ethiopia: Early warning-early action for drought risk management

By: Anna Law, R4 Program Officer at the World Food Programme

Shifting from disaster management to climate risk management

In many developing countries, responses to recurrent hunger crises have traditionally focused on appeals-based emergency responses, rather than preventative livelihood support.  In 2004, recognizing the conventional response system’s failure to address chronic food insecurity, the Government of Ethiopia established the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), a national social protection system which provides predictable, multi-year assistance to 7-8 million chronically food-insecure people.

However, in addition to PSNP beneficiaries, Ethiopia counts approximately 5 million transiently food-insecure people, who are at risk in cases of severe climate shock. Preventing these transiently insecure households from depleting assets and falling into destitution as a result of shocks is central to the sustainability of the overall PSNP. Recognizing this, the government, in collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Bank, developed the Ethiopian Drought Insurance project (EDI). Piloted in 2006, the EDI was Ethiopia’s first national-level index-insurance program, and sought to insure the government and donors against the risk of national drought catastrophe on the international insurance market. No pay-out was triggered as there was no major drought during the pilot period. However, the project demonstrated both the government’s willingness to adopt this index-based approach to humanitarian assistance, as well as the feasibility of using market mechanisms to finance large systemic risks such as drought.

In 2008, building on the EDI experience, the government, WFP and the World Bank established the Livelihoods, Early Assessment and Protection (LEAP) mechanism. LEAP is an integrated food security early response system which combines early warning, capacity building, contingency planning and contingent finance. While LEAP is based on donor-provided contingent financing rather than commercial insurance, it adopts the EDI’s index-based approach. The use of an index helps increase the predictability and timeliness of response, by establishing an objective, pre-agreed drought level to guide fund disbursements.

The role of LEAP within the overall national risk management system

LEAP seeks to bridge the PSNP’s ‘assistance gap’ in case of shocks, by allowing the immediate scale-up of the PSNP in anticipation of severe droughts. It is designed to trigger the timely disbursement of contingent funding to provide livelihood protection to the additional people at risk of food insecurity, as well as to existing PSNP beneficiaries requiring additional months of assistance.

Importantly, however, LEAP is not solely a mechanism to quantify and trigger contingent finance for food crises at the national level. The system’s other main function is to support Ethiopia’s broader, on-going risk management system, particularly at sub-national levels. Thus, LEAP’s final outputs (i.e. beneficiary numbers) support the PSNP scale-up; at the same time, the LEAP system’s intermediary outputs (i.e. agro-meteorological information such as rainfall, and crop-specific yield reductions and water balance) support a wide range of climate risk management initiatives carried out by various actors, particularly at the sub-national level.

This year marked a key milestone for LEAP and for the advancement of the government’s disaster management agenda more broadly. As noted by the State Minister of Agriculture at the occasion of the presentation of the LEAP-generated beneficiary estimates in May 2013: “While the LEAP intermediary outputs have been in use since 2008, we have now reached the stage where it can generate reliable, verifiable, and timely estimates of number of people at risk in the event of major drought.”

The extensive capacity building work carried out in the context of LEAP has played a key role in strengthening Ethiopia’s overall risk management system. A strong emphasis was placed from the start on ensuring that the government fully owns LEAP and coordinates its operationalization, in order to ensure its sustainability. Since 2011, over 200 people, including many government staff, have been trained in how to use the LEAP software and its various outputs.

LEAP as a national-level trigger and financing mechanism for food security early response

An effective food security early warning system must not only generate meaningful warning information, but must also enable the government and its partners to respond to these warnings in a timely manner. Recognizing that existing early warning systems often fail to trigger pre-emptive action, LEAP was established as an integrated early response system rather than a stand-alone early warning system: it combines early warning with contingency planning, capacity building, and contingent finance.

The LEAP software runs localized agro-climatic models to estimate future crop yields and rangeland production. It then converts these production estimates into the number of people, by district, projected to be in need of livelihood protection in case of yield reductions. These beneficiary numbers are in turn used to calculate the financial resources necessary to scale up the PSNP, which triggers the release of contingent finance.

The system originally focused on drought risk in cropping areas. Agriculture, most of which is rain-fed, accounts for half of Ethiopia’s GDP and sustains 80% of its population. As a result, drought-related crop failure is the single largest source of food insecurityin the country[1]. Nevertheless, extending LEAP to include flood risk and cover pastoral areas is key to establishing a comprehensive, country-wide early warning tool; work is underway to integrate flood and pastoral indices into the system.

Future crop yields are estimated using crop and weather monitoring data and work is underway to complement this with seasonal weather forecasts. Monitoring information is provided by a combination of ground stations (as of 2013, 57 automated weather stations have been installed throughout the country in the context of LEAP) and satellites (in particular through GEONETCast, a global network of satellite-based data dissemination systems). Below is an example of July 2013 LEAP output, showing rainfall, water balance index and yield projections for wheat, for the 2013 belg season.

LEAP-generated yield and beneficiary projections are then complemented with field-based assessments, to determine final beneficiary numbers. Resources can then be disbursed immediately from a contingent fund administered by the World Bank.

LEAP as a tool to support broader climate risk management efforts, particularly at sub-national level

The agro-meteorological information generated on a continuous basis by LEAP helps support various risk management initiatives led by government, United Nations, NGO or private sector actors. For example, LEAP rainfall and yield reduction outputs are used by the National Meteorological Agency for its regional early warning bulletins, and by the Ministry of Agriculture for its multi-sector contingency plans.

Another promising application for LEAP intermediary outputs is weather index insurance for small scale farmers, given the software’s potential for enabling  payouts to be triggered not only on a larger scale, but also in a more transparent and timely manner.

In addition, a pilot project led by the NGO Project Concern International in collaboration with WFP, is testing the use of LEAP to improve the decision-making capacity of pastoralists in the context of increasing drought risk, by helping them identify water and grazing grounds. This use of the software to generate strategic information used by pastoralists in the field marks the beginning of a new and potentially powerful application of LEAP to household-level disaster risk mitigation.

For more information:

Disaster Risk Management and Food Security Sector – Government of Ethiopia

[email protected]

World Food Programme –Ethiopia Country Office

[email protected]