The Green Climate Fund signed a funding agreement with Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) today to make communities in northern Tanzania more resilient to water strains caused by climate change.

The signing of the Funded Activity Agreement (FAA) with KfW, Germany’s development bank and a GCF Accredited Entity, allows GCF to begin transferring grant assistance in this USD 194 million project.

The project focuses on Tanzania’s Simiyu region, where rainfall has become more unpredictable, while droughts and floods have become more frequent.

Javier Manzanares, GCF Executive Director ad interim, lauded the project’s community-driven approach. “This important initiative will focus on enhancing the clear needs of local people to improve their ability to deal with climate change by securing sustainable water supplies and making farming practices more resilient,” he said.

Klaus Müller, Director East Africa, DR Congo and African Union at KfW, pointed out that “the Simiyu Project has the potential to substantially increase the climate resilience of rural and urban households, particularly small-scale farmers and women.” “It is a very important project to secure the livelihoods of almost half a million people in the semi-arid north-west of Tanzania, a region that is particularly affected by the negative impact of climate change,” he added.

Mussa Sima, Deputy Minister in the Tanzanian Vice President’s Office, said the project will directly benefit 495,000 people, over half of them women.

“Tanzania is among the most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change,” he said. “One of these impacts is a lack of clean and safe water for domestic and agricultural uses. Therefore, adaptation measures are inevitable. In this regard, this project has come at the right time.”

The project targets the most vulnerable among the residents living in the Simiyu Region. Water supply is a major challenge in the region, where only about 20 percent of the urban and 40 percent of the rural population have access to clean drinking water.

GCF Board member Richard Muyungi, from Tanzania, was also present at the signing on the sidelines of the international climate change meeting currently being held in Katowice, Poland.