Innovative Partnerships to Scale Up Climate-Smart Agriculture for Smallholder Farmers in Southern Africa

Abstract

Southern Africa has a mono-modal rainfall regime which is largely rain-fed and dominated by smallholder farmers with limited livelihood alternatives. To improve farmers’ resilience to changing weather patterns, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) solutions have been developed. However, despite pockets of success, CSA has not been widely adopted. At the field level, farmers’ uptake of CSA has generally lagged behind scientific advances, with farmers still experiencing poor livelihood outcomes. Drawing lessons from ongoing development projects, we describe the initiation and development of three innovative partnerships to scale up four climate-smart solutions: a bilateral partnership (Zimbabwe), a multilateral partnership (Zambia) and a unipolar partnership (Malawi). The processes and experiences of forming country project teams, models of partnership and methods used to reach farmers are also described in this chapter. The key results are as follows: (i) successful partnerships working to scale up CSA are closely linked to well-defined, mutual benefits for all stakeholders; (ii) to scale up CSA it is essential to build on existing, successful mechanisms; (iii) transparency is needed in the decision-making process among the partners.