LocationsFarming the future with Climate-Smart Crops
Seeding the Future: Transforming Agriculture in Egypt’s Nile Delta
August 30, 2024
In this candid 2-minute video, Engy shares firsthand experiences, unexpected challenges, and key impacts of this groundbreaking initiative.
The Context
Picture a future where Egypt's ancient Nile Delta, once threatened by climate change, thrives as a beacon of agricultural innovation & resilience. Fields of quinoa and pier millet crops sway in the breeze, tended to by automated machines operated by women and men, while tourists walk in the periphery of the farm with AR headsets, tasting local delicacies and diving into the rich history of the land.
This isn't science fiction. It's a vision born from the minds of Nile Delta farmers, in a strategic foresight session led by UNDP’s Accelerator Labs in Cairo, Egypt.
The UNDP Environment team and their close partner, the Desert Research Center, a division of Egypt’s Ministry of Agriculture, had often encountered difficulties in scaling pilots for climate-smart crops, struggling to understand how to engage with market players. The Climate Smart Crops (CSC) project helped define a successful route to scaling the project through the direct involvement of private sector players. Just as importantly, it validated the Accelerator Labs' approach within the Country Office. Engy admits, “We had colleagues and partners confessing that, at the beginning, they thought the Accelerator Lab was not useful, but the results of this project changed their mind completely.”
The Nile Delta has been identified as one of the spots most vulnerable to climate change and could even drown. This is one of the critical reasons why UNDP chose this project to empower the vulnerable communities here.Engy Abdel Wahab, Head of Exploration, UNDP Egypt Accelerator
The Process
Understanding the Present
The journey began with a comprehensive ‘sensing’ phase, which involved 4 field visits and 17 interviews with a wide range of stakeholders that could potentially be relevant to agriculture in Egypt- from think tanks and academia to the private sector and policymakers. This was followed by a phase of behavioral analysis of agricultural bodies that oversaw various aspects of agriculture like irrigation, farmers cooperatives etc. through 8 in-depth interviews. This gave the team a thorough understanding of the agricultural value chains that would be interesting to pilot this project.
The team then dove deeper through a socio-economic analysis, using focus groups and surveys with farmers to gain insights on income models, education levels and climate change awareness. Last but not least, the team conducted about 60 interviews with the private sector players to understand potential paths to scale. “The entire first phase was about understanding the status quo, how people think and make decisions,” explains Engy. “It revealed crucial insights about farmer behavior and the decision-making process, which enabled the team to select climate-smart crops that would best suit farmers’ needs based on their resilience, nutrition, yield, and profitability”. The project team prioritized Panicum, Quinoa, and Pier millets as potential game-changers for Egyptian agriculture.
This approach recognizes a crucial step often overlooked in foresight exercises: deeply understanding the present before imagining the future. Without this foundation, teams risk overlooking the drivers and motivations of the intervention's beneficiaries, potentially diluting the impact of the entire initiative.
Imagining the Future
Building on this sound understanding of agricultural value chains, farmer behaviors and motivations of various players within the agricultural ecosystem, the team launched a two-phase future-thinking journey with the objective of exploring what the future of Climate-Smart crops in Egypt could look like.
"Phase One was conducted with agricultural stakeholders from Cairo or other urban areas," Engy explains. The team conducted 30 interviews with these stakeholders, including policy-makers, think tanks, and NGOs, focusing on signal mapping – a way to collect, categorize, and analyze signals of change - and identifying drivers of change. These were then used to build initial scenarios for farmers in Phase 2. “At that time, we believed that urban stakeholders were more knowledgeable about the signals of change as well as the foresight process,” says Engy. “However, we were proved wrong,” she admits. The team was surprised and humbled by the farmers’ knowledge and awareness regarding the signals of change, the technologies emerging in the agricultural space, and their grasp on the mapping process. “For example,” says Engy, “they suggested adding certain emerging agricultural technologies like robotics & soilless agriculture that we had missed.”
Phase Two was designed to engage the rural community more deeply and understand their preferred futures, needs and concerns regarding CSCs. “A three-day workshop was designed to immerse participants in a holistic future-thinking journey. " These workshops employed a variety of creative techniques to help participants envision Egypt in 2050, including storytelling and video immersion, gaming, and clay modeling. Once they were fully immersed into the future and the possibilities of CSCs, they used a variation of the Futures Games method to build scenarios of what agriculture in Egypt would look like after transitioning to CSCs.
The most challenging step for the participants was making the transition from a challenge-focused mindset to a future exploration mindset. They needed to let go of this 'solutioning' mindset and get into the 'futuring' mindsetEngy Abdel Wahab, Head of Exploration, UNDP Egypt Accelerator
"The most challenging step for the participants was making the transition from a challenge-focused mindset to a future exploration mindset. They needed to let go of this 'solutioning' mindset and get into the 'futuring' mindset,” Engy reflects. This struggle is common in foresight exercises, especially when working with stakeholders accustomed to problem-solving rather than imagining. The team tackled this by designing sessions involving continuous and persistent immersion of participants in futuring exercises, consistently encouraging hypothetical thinking.
Cultural dynamics, particularly age-related, posed another challenge because “in Egypt, there’s a tradition that younger people listen to the older and don’t really voice their opinion or disagree with them, as a sign of respect”. The team addressed this by emphasizing intergenerational dialogue and emphasizing how the experience of the old can build on the technology exposure of the young and the other way around.
The journey culminated in a reflection phase on the last day, bringing stakeholders together to discuss recommendations for scaling the adoption of climate-smart crops.
Tangible Impacts: Foresight in Action
The foresight exercise set off a chain reaction across multiple sectors:
In the policy arena, the team's work caught the attention of high-level decision-makers. Following this exercise, the Ministry of International Cooperation, which had been a part of the process, approached the team to help them apply their foresight expertise in another initiative that focused on empowering private-sector exports.
The project team produced actionable concept notes and signed MoUs at COP 28 on crucial issues like agro-tourism with the Knowledge Economy Foundation (KEF) and women’s empowerment in agriculture with the Egyptian Food Bank. In doing so, the team debunked the myth that foresight exercises don’t lead to action, exemplifying the actionability of foresight when it’s done well.
The private sector stakeholder, Tseppas, also began exploring climate-smart crop opportunities. At COP 27, Tseppas tested bakery products made of these climate-smart crops. Based on positive consumer reactions, they expressed interest in signing contracts with farmers who adopted these crops.
Within UNDP itself, the project broadened UNDP Egypt's focus to include food systems and sustainable agriculture and, as Engy puts it, “It opened up the portfolio for agriculture”.
The project's most significant impact was changing mindsets. "Through the exploration of scenarios, rural communities opened up to new possibilities like agrotourism as a stream of supplementary income, something they wouldn’t have considered before," highlights Engy.
Photo by Mohamad Sameh on Unsplash
Foresight Fieldnotes: Harvesting Project Insights
For country offices looking to embark on a similar journey, Engy offers some important advice:
- First, be ready to challenge your assumptions. You might be surprised by where knowledge comes from. Sometimes, the stakeholders and community members that you least expect are the ones who can contribute the most. The team was astonished at farmers' ability to map signals of change and add to the list of technological solutions in the agricultural sphere.
- Second, cast your net wide when you consider stakeholders to engage. “We collaborated with more than 60 market players, policymakers, civil society organizations, agricultural bodies, think tanks, and, of course, the farmers themselves,” Engy explained. Each of them brought their unique concerns and needs to the table, which proved invaluable in designing an intervention that could be adopted and scaled by the entire system. The team experienced firsthand that a diverse range of voices can enrich the exercise's outcome.
- Third, make your foresight exercise tangible, contextual, and immersive. Get hands-on with activities like clay modeling, gaming or immersive videos. This helps make abstract futures feel real and engaging, especially when you're working with groups that may have entrenched habits, or groups that the possibilities of the future may threaten.
- Fourth, never underestimate cultural sensitivities. When the team decided to explore the importance of the role of women in agriculture in the workshops, they knew they needed to ensure that men and women were equally engaged in the process. “We didn’t want men to feel ‘sidelined’,” says Engy. To accommodate this, the team divided the workshop participants into five groups, with three of them building scenarios on the future of women in agriculture in Egypt, while the remaining two focused on men.
- Lastly, leverage foresight's collaborative power to bring various government ministries together. It has always been challenging to demonstrate the interlinkages between developmental issues requiring different government branches to work together. However, at one of the scaling workshops, stakeholders from the Ministries of International Cooperation, Agriculture, Tourism, and Environment came together and recognized the crucial connection between environmental sustainability, agricultural practices, and tourism development. This led to a unique concept: Nexus for Environment, Agriculture, and Tourism (NEAT), a term recognizing the need to align policies and agendas to promote sustainable agritourism in Egypt. This feat was made possible through the foresight process.
Futures literacy can be a powerful tool for changing behaviors in the community. Instead of trying to convince people of how the change could be good for them, ‘futures thinking’ enables them to imagine and experience the change themselves. And that can be very powerful.Engy Abdel Wahab, Head of Exploration, UNDP Egypt Accelerator
Sowing Forward: Planting Seeds of Longevity
Looking ahead, Engy emphasized the importance of keeping foresight going. She stresses the need for continuous signal mapping to “help people internalize the concept of foresight”. This commitment is already taking shape, with UNDP Egypt developing a horizon scanner platform to stay tuned to emerging signals of change. Engy concluded, "As UNDP Accelerator Labs, we design solutions based on existing challenges, gaps, and needs. It's about translating these needs into something actionable. And foresight is an effective tool for this."
