Climate Adaptation Strategies for Smallholder Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22811339Keywords:
index insurance, climate information services, sub-Saharan Africa, panel household survey, adaptation determinants, smallholder agriculture, drought-tolerant varieties, agroforestry, rainwater harvestingAbstract
Smallholder farmers across sub-Saharan Africa face increasingly erratic rainfall and more frequent dry spells, and a
growing menu of adaptation strategies, drought-tolerant crop varieties, agroforestry, small-scale water harvesting,
index-based insurance and mobile-delivered climate information services, has been promoted to help them cope.
Whether these strategies are reaching the farmers who need them most, and whether adoption translates into
measurable gains in yield and income, remains contested, in part because much of the supporting evidence draws
on single-country or single-strategy studies. We analysed a three-wave household panel (2018, 2021, 2023) of
2,412 smallholder maize- and sorghum-growing households across four countries, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi and
Burkina Faso, that recorded adoption of the five strategies alongside plot-level yields, household income, asset
holdings, access to credit and extension, and exposure to a district-level standardised precipitation index. Adoption
rose over the panel for every strategy except index insurance, which stagnated at under 9% throughout, and a
correlated random-effects probit found that extension contact, prior drought exposure, off-farm income, and, for
insurance and climate information services specifically, mobile phone ownership were the strongest and most
consistent predictors of adoption, while land tenure insecurity and female headship were associated with lower
uptake of the two most capital-intensive strategies, agroforestry and water harvesting. Household fixed-effects yield
and income regressions indicated that drought-tolerant varieties and water harvesting were associated with the
largest average yield gains (17% and 14% respectively, relative to non-adopting household-years), agroforestry
adoption showed a smaller, slower-emerging effect concentrated after three or more years under trees, and index
insurance, despite low uptake, was associated with a 21% reduction in the yield loss experienced during the two
severe drought years captured in the panel. Combining two or more strategies was associated with larger gains
than any single strategy, consistent with complementarities across the portfolio. These findings support continued
investment in extension-led delivery of drought-tolerant seed and water harvesting, targeted subsidy or bundling of
index insurance with credit to overcome persistently low uptake, and closer attention to the tenure and gender
barriers that appear to exclude some of the most vulnerable households from higher-cost adaptation options.
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