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In the context of increasing climate variability and uncertainty, access to and use of reliable climate information to inform decisions in the agricultural sector are becoming instrumental to strengthen farmers’ resilience to climate shocks. The target countries face a number of challenges in generating, supplying and communicating climate information tailored to the end users’ needs. To address this issue, there are on-going experiences in the CCAFS West Africa sites testing and facilitating the access to knowledge on local climate features and seasonal climate forecasts, developing climate smart technologies and mainstreaming findings into policies.

This also includes improving the production of climate forecast information using historical climate records, use of satellite data to complement the weather station data (ENACTS) and predicting crop yield (Earth-Audit and SARRA-H models) as being tried out by AGRHYMET and California Academy of Sciences. All these and other past experiences in the region will be capitalized and put into use in a participatory way to support farmers and local communities to plan their livelihood activities, which go beyond agriculture (crop, livestock, and tree). Moreover, the project will involve strong multi-actors’ partnership and the use of ICT to reach larger number of end users quicker and cheaper taking advantage of the server already installed at the AGRHYMET Regional Centre.

In the target countries, we will take stock of these approaches and communication channels and derive some lessons after an impact assessment work, in order to upscale the findings to new sites and new countries.

Photo credit: CIAT.