USAID Bureau for Food Security (BFS) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for Climate Smart Agriculture | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The USAID Bureau for Food Security Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for Climate Smart Agriculture is a collaborative research and innovation funding opportunity aimed at improving how smallholder farmers in low income countries cope with climate and weather related shocks. The core purpose is to identify and support practical, affordable, and scalable climate smart agriculture (CSA) approaches that help smallholder based food and agriculture systems adapt to changing conditions such as drought, flooding, heat stress, shifting seasons, and increased pest and disease pressure. USAID frames this as an effort to find real world solutions that can be tested and proven in the field, then expanded to reach larger populations and markets. In many cases, USAID is explicitly interested in interventions that deliver "double or triple win" outcomes: stronger resilience and adaptation for farmers, improved productivity and incomes, and, where feasible, reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

This is structured as a Broad Agency Announcement, which is designed to attract a wide range of innovative ideas and partners rather than prescribing a single narrow project model. The BAA emphasizes co creation and co design, meaning USAID is looking for partners that will help shape solutions jointly, not just implement a prewritten plan. It also highlights co investment and collaboration, signaling a preference for approaches that bring in additional expertise, resources, technologies, or capital from outside USAID, including from the private sector, universities, research groups, NGOs, or other entities. Rather than being a one time standalone solicitation, the BAA acts as an umbrella announcement under which specific funding and partnership opportunities would be released as addenda. In practice, that means applicants need to pay close attention to each addendum because that is where the specific technical questions, desired outcomes, and submission instructions are typically clarified.

Addendum Number 01 under this BAA targets a specific bottleneck: limited private sector engagement and investment in CSA practices and technologies. USAID is seeking knowledge, models, and solutions that help overcome the reasons businesses and investors have not engaged more strongly in climate smart agriculture for smallholders. The emphasis remains on helping smallholder systems adapt to climate and weather impacts, but the pathway is through unlocking stronger private sector participation. That could include ideas that reduce investment risk, improve profitability, strengthen value chain incentives, create financeable business cases, expand access to appropriate technologies, or build markets and services that make CSA adoption easier and more attractive for farmers and agribusinesses. The announcement also signals that collaboration tied to USAID's priority value chains is especially welcome, since value chain partnerships can create the demand pull and commercial incentives that help CSA scale beyond pilots.

Geographically, the primary focus is on countries supported by the US Government Feed the Future initiative. Feed the Future is USAID's flagship global hunger and food security initiative, and the BAA encourages solutions that fit within Feed the Future focus and aligned countries and their priority value chains. This matters because proposals that clearly match Feed the Future contexts and crop or livestock systems may be seen as more immediately actionable and scalable within existing USAID programming and partner networks. The announcement directs applicants to feedthefuture.org for more detail on where Feed the Future operates and what value chains are prioritized.

From an administrative standpoint, the opportunity was issued by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) under Funding Opportunity Number BAA OAA BFS 2015 and is categorized under science and technology and other research and development. The funding instrument type listed is a cooperative agreement, which typically implies substantial involvement by USAID during implementation, often through joint planning, technical engagement, and iterative learning rather than a hands off grant. The eligible applicant pool is described as unrestricted, meaning it is open to essentially any type of organization, subject to any additional eligibility clarifications that might appear in the full text or addenda. The posting indicates no cost sharing or matching requirement, so applicants are not required to provide matching funds to be considered, although the BAA's emphasis on co investment suggests that voluntary leverage or partner contributions could still strengthen a concept where appropriate.

The timeline in the source information shows the opportunity was posted March 17, 2015, created April 6, 2015, and had an original and current closing date of March 16, 2016, with an archive date of March 17, 2016. That means this specific posting is historical and closed, but the structure is still useful for understanding how USAID framed CSA innovation and private sector engagement under the Bureau for Food Security. The listed point of contact for access issues was Kelly Fink, Contracting/Agreement Officer, at 202-567-5295, and the notice references a corresponding posting on the federal opportunities platform used at the time.

Overall, the opportunity is best understood as USAID asking innovators and implementers to bring forward field grounded, cost effective CSA ideas that can be piloted, tested, and scaled in smallholder contexts, with Addendum 01 sharpening the challenge to solutions that successfully mobilize private sector participation and investment. The program logic is that climate adaptation in smallholder agriculture will scale faster and last longer when it becomes embedded in markets, services, and value chains rather than relying only on donor funded pilots.

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