Innovative climate change partnerships bring hope for smallholder farmers in Africa
Vivian Atakos, Vanessa Meadu and Catherine Mungai (CCAFS East Africa)
Report back from Farmers Day at the UN Climate Change Conference.
If the music changes, you must change the dance steps. So goes a popular proverb from West Africa. This has been the realization of Kisilu Musya, a small scale farmer from the Eastern part of Kenya, a semi-arid region experiencing some of the worst impacts of climate change.
Kisilu remembers well his farming system 15 years ago.“The rains were plenty. I grew local maize varieties every season and received a bumper harvest each time,” he told the audience at a side event organized by the Africa Climate-Smart Agriculture Alliance on 2 December in Paris. However, with a changing climate, he noted that over a period of time local maize varieties no longer gave good yields. He was struggling to feed his family of nine children and wife Christina. Subsequently, he joined a farmer field school operating in his village where he amassed knowledge on new farming methods and accessed drought-tolerant seed varieties. Now a research farmer, Kisilu tries out new crop varieties, determining which ones yield best before sharing lessons with his community. His main concern, however, is the need for long term solutions: where crops, trees and cattle work together to form a sustainable and long term circle of produce.
Read the full article: CCAFS-CGIAR
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