R4 Rural Resilience Initiative
The R4 Rural Resilience Initiative was launched to give farmers and rural families a new way to manage some of the risks they face from increasingly erratic weather. The initiative offers households access to drought insurance and credit; it facilitates their work on environmental projects that strengthen their communities; and it encourages families to save. Empowered with these risk-management tools, families can develop resilience to climate change and the challenges it presents to their food security and long-term well-being.
The R4 Rural Resilience Initiative is an innovative approach to helping communities better manage risk, one that involves a set of integrated tools: insurance, credit, savings, and disaster risk reduction. R4 is a strategic partnership between Oxfam and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) designed to enable vulnerable rural households to strengthen their food and income security in the context of increasing climate risks.
R4 builds on the initial success of an integrated risk management framework developed in Ethiopia by Oxfam, the Relief Society of Tigray, Ethiopian farmers, and several other national and global partners. The framework was designed to enable poor farmers to strengthen their food and income security through a combination of improved resource management (risk reduction), insurance (risk transfer), microcredit (prudent risk taking), and savings (risk reserves).
R4s goal is to achieve food security and build the resilience of the most vulnerable rural communities against climate and weather shocks, through a risk management-focused and market-based approach.
In addition to directly improving the lives and livelihoods of rural communities, R4 aims to catalyze long-term, structural changes extending well beyond the Initiative itself. R4 will contribute to the development of a comprehensive planning approach for food security, adaptation, and resilience by country governments and its partners. R4 links labor-based safety nets that provide cash or food in exchange for work on community projects with community risk reduction activities that protect assets against disasters and improve productivity. Farmers participating in R4 will have access to tools to build physical resilience to weather-related shocks, and they will exchange work for enrollment in the insurance program.
The Initiative will also help build a sustainable commercial market for risk management products in the countries where it is implemented ensuring the sustainability of the Initiative. The strategy underlying the insurance component is to gradually transition from premiums paid with labor to premiums paid in cash for those who are able to afford it.
