Sowing Seeds of Resilience: Transforming Kenya's Makueni County with Climate-smart Agriculture

As a country with arid and semi-arid land, the effects of climate change put food security and many livelihoods at stake, demanding an urgent shift towards resilient and sustainable farming. 

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) offers solutions by promoting practices that enhance productivity, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, CSA technologies are highly diverse and vary between productions systems and regions. Therefore, adopting these practices requires knowledge, access to relevant climate information and the collective effort of farmers and stakeholders. 

The Alliance, through the AICCRA project (Accelerating the Impact of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa), acknowledges the essential role of capacity building and knowledge dissemination in promoting the widespread adoption of CSA. This work focuses on enabling the effective implementation of integrated practices, which although complex, can be vital for resilient agriculture. In a significant step towards achieving this, the Alliance - in collaboration with the County Government of Makueni, the Women Farmers Association of Kenya, and the Kimatwa Women Savings and Credit Cooperative Society (a dynamic women-led farmers’ cooperative) - organized a two-day training program on CSA, reaching 360 farmers: 268 women and 92 men. The choice of the Women Farmers Association and Kimatwa Women SACCO as collaborators for the training is a reflection and recognition of the important role of women in agriculture and their vulnerability to climate change. Working through the cooperative allowed the partners to reach hundreds of farmers and increase the project's impact. Similarly, some of the farmers in the SACCO were part of AICCRA-led demonstrations where a micronutrient-rich and drought-tolerant bean variety performed exceptionally well.