The transition to Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) in Africa is fundamentally hampered by a persistent accountability gap. Despite broad political endorsement, adaptation finance and reporting continue to rely on top down, standardised metrics that fail to capture local resilience priorities.
ARIN’s Locally Led Adaptation Metrics for Africa (LAMA) Project reveals stark evidence of this failure: only 11.2% of African households participate in the design of adaptation interventions, yet 70.4% believe they should define what “success” means. Furthermore, the exclusion of marginalised groups remains widespread, with 58.1% of households reporting no female members in local climate leadership roles.
This brief argues that Community-Defined Indicators (CDIs) are the essential compass for achieving effective, equitable, and locally grounded LLA. We call upon COP30 parties, finance institutions, and African governments to institutionalise CDIs by adopting three strategic pillars:
- Mandate Local Metrics: Embed CDIs within all national and global adaptation frameworks (NAPs, NDCs, GGA).
- Reform Climate Finance: Shift fund disbursement from compliance based reporting to performance-based payments tied to locally validated outcomes.
- Empower Local Data Systems: Invest in the institutional capacity of grassroots organizations and establish participatory, digitally enabled monitoring systems.
The Challenge: Bridging the Accountability Deficit
Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) is globally recognised as the most effective pathway for building climate resilience for vulnerable communities, particularly Small-Scale Farmers (SSFs) in Africa. However, the majority of adaptation efforts remain disconnected from the lived experiences and priorities of people on the ground.
The LAMA Project, supported by the IDRC and implemented by the Africa Research and Impact Network (ARIN), addresses this fundamental disconnect by co-developing community-defined indicators rooted in the knowledge and lived experiences of smallholder farmers across diverse agroecological zones in Kenya’s Lake Region Economic Bloc (LREB). The core methodology utilised Citizen Science and the Participatory Visioning Approach (PVA) to ensure that the metrics for resilience are co-created by the communities themselves.
