The frequency, duration, and magnitude of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and variation in rainfall onset and cessation periods will continue to increase. Such stress may result in significant shifts in the functioning of ecosystems. As climate change affects the capacity of ecosystems to mitigate the effects of extreme events such as drought and floods, leading to disruptions in water supply and food production, or to the destruction of infrastructure, human well-being is ultimately impacted. Chief among those impacts are those on the four dimensions of food security: food availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability. An interesting channel of impacts is through the observed and forecasted increase in the variability of water availability. This is said to cause uncertainty in agricultural production resulting in reduced productivity, food insecurity, weak economic growth and the widespread food poverty in Africa today. Due to overreliance on rain-fed agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, people usually engage in both temporary and permanent migration after consecutive years of bad harvests and reduced incomes from agriculture with migration acting as an adaptation strategy to climatic shocks. Food value chains can be significantly affected, something that the paper identifies as an area that requires further research mainly on the resilience of food value chains to water variability.

Public works programs (PWPs) in sub-Saharan African countries have re-emerged as an important policy to stimulate employment generation in addition to their protective role such as consumption smoothening. The paper reviews evidence on the extent to which empirical research can substantiate the claim that labor-intensive PWPs in African countries have important economic benefits. We also refer to the experiences with PWPs in India and China for comparison. We aim to answer the following questions: Do PWPs stimulate job creation and raise earning potentials of beneficiaries? And, how do these programs augment employment generation. Based on our review complemented with secondary data analyses, we conclude that in addition to their role as an effective anti-poverty instrument, labor-intensive PWPs have important roles in mitigating poor labor market outcomes and thus enhance employment creation. Yet we also find that more systematic investigations on shortterm implementation outcomes of PWPs are necessary, and-due to externalities that are not captured by short-term assessments at the program level-long-run impacts on employment and development also need more research attention.

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