About: Despite economic growth during the last decade, the mountainous rural areas of Lao PDR remain the poorest of the country. This situation is particularly marked for the Northern Upland Provinces, where more than 40% of the rural population lives below the poverty line.

Agricultural production systems in these areas have undergone rapid changes in recent decades. Traditional systems in a mosaic landscape have given way to single-crops with no fallow in a uniform landscape; farming is taking place on increasingly marginal lands, and forest cover has declined. While these developments have led to productivity gains in the short term, they have also led to significant environmental impacts including loss of soil fertility, erosion, loss of biodiversity and pollution of water resources, leading to levelling-off or decrease of yields and increased vulnerability of farmers to climate change.

In this context, maintaining the ecological functions of watershed through an integrated watershed management (IWM) approach is a high priority.

This project will support AFD and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Government of Laos in the design of an appropriate project to improve water security and build resilience of agricultural production systems to climate change via sustainable, community-based watershed management in the four Northern provinces.

There will be two main phases to the project:

• Phase 1 – Diagnosis, data collection and validation of the structure of the project: Conducting a review of existing watershed management policies, agricultural practices

• Phase 2: Project design: Preparing preliminary designs, identifying partners/stakeholders, and defining monitoring and evaluation systems and indicators