Pumpkins Against Poverty

Climate change category

BANGLADESH

Sustainable and climate resilient agriculture

practicalaction.org

This project represents a best practice in terms of climate change resilience. It supports farmers and displaced people of flood areas by offering them trainings and improved technologies for the management of livelihoods through the “sandbar cropping”.

Climate change must be tackled through both mitigation and adaptation. It is essential that a climate-smart solution incorporates both of these key principles to remain robust and well suited for future challenges. This solution addresses both adaption and resilience.

Innovation: It aims to assist displaced people by offering them improved technologies, trainings and support to produce food crops such as pumpkins, squash and other vegetables, in “transitional barren sandbars” through an ad hoc cropping method. This innovation has been developed mainly for extreme poor communities living in fragile environments due to natural shocks and hazards, that have led to the loss of homes and businesses.

Impact: Several developing countries, as Bangladesh, are rich of unused natural resources, as for instance its transitional lands of the river system. This technique offers the opportunity to transform a challenge into an opportunity, contributing to mitigate local socio-economic and environmental vulnerability and avoiding communities’ displacement. The food production model “Pumpkins against Poverty” in infertile transitional lands has already benefited over 22.000 farmers on more than 4.000 hectares, producing more than 120.000 million tons of pumpkins and saving 1.000 million liters of water. This consolidated best practice could be easily replicated in many other areas adversely affected by climate change like in South Asia and Africa.

Mr. Nazmul Chowdhuri, former Strategic Lead at Practical Action awarded by Ms. Diana Battaggia