Justice A. Tambo

Smallholder farmers’ perceptions of and adaptations to climate change in the Nigerian savanna

The savanna region of Africa is a potential breadbasket of the continent but is severely affected by climate change. Understanding farmers’ perceptions of climate change and the types of adjustments they have made in their farming practices in response to these changes will offer some insights into necessary interventions to ensure a successful adaptation in the region. This paper explores how smallholder farmers in the Nigerian savanna perceive and adapt to climate change. It is based on a field survey carried out among 200 smallholder farm households selected from two agro-ecological zones. The results show that most of the farmers have noticed changes in climate and have consequently adjusted their farming practices to adapt. There are no large differences in the adaptation practices across the region, but farmers in Sudan savanna agro-ecological zone are more likely to adapt to changes in temperature than those in northern Guinea savanna. The main adaptation methods include varying planting dates, use of drought tolerant and early maturing varieties and tree planting. Some of the farmers are facing limitations in adapting because of lack of information on climate change and the suitable adaptation measures and lack of credit. The study then concludes that to ensure successful adaptation to climate change in the region, concerted efforts are needed to design and promote planned adaptation measures that fit into the local context and also to educate farmers on climate change and appropriate adaptation measures.

Enhancing resilience to climate shocks through farmer innovation: evidence from northern Ghana

In this paper, we contribute to recent attempts to operationalize the measurement of climate resilience by measuring household resilience to climate shocks and by assessing the role of farmer innovations in enhancing climate resilience. Adapting the Food and Agriculture Organization’s resilience tool, we develop a household resilience index using survey data from rural farm households in northern Ghana. The index consists of six components and 23 indicators and was constructed using two indicator-weighting approaches. The proposed resilience index is a simple tool that can be used to quantitatively assess the resilience of households to the incidence of climate shocks and to monitor interventions aimed at building rural household resilience to unpredictable shocks. The results indicate that farm households in the study region are weakly resilient to climate shocks. We also show that farmers go beyond adoption of externally driven technologies to develop their very own innovations, and these innovations contribute significantly to enhancing household resilience to climate shocks. Using propensity score matching method, we found that farmer innovators are about 6% more resilient to climate shocks than non-innovators. This result is robust to alternative weighting approaches and matching algorithms, and also to hidden bias. The paper concludes that policy efforts aiming at enhancing farm households’ resilience to climate shocks should consider providing support for farmers’ innovations.

Identification and Acceleration of Farmer Innovativeness in Upper East Ghana

The generation of innovations has traditionally been attributed to research organizations and the farmer’s own potential for the development of innovative solutions has largely been neglected. In this chapter, we explore the innovativeness of farmers in Upper East Ghana. To this end, we employ farmer innovation contests for the identification of local innovations. Awards such as motorcycles function as an incentive for farmers to share innovations and develop new practices. The impact of Farmer Field Fora is evaluated by matching non-participants to participants using propensity scores of observable characteristics. The results indicate that farmers do actively generate and test innovative practices to address prevalent problems. Moreover, this innovative behavior can be further stimulated by Farmer Field Fora, which were tested to significantly and positively affect innovation generation.