Climate-Smart Technologies to Improve Food Security for Smallholder Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa

A team of graduate students from Columbia University's SIPA, in collaboration with the Regional Centre of Excellence against Hunger and Malnutrition (CERFAM), conducted in-depth research on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in Sub-Saharan Africa through focused case-studies in Kenya, Namibia, and Madagascar. Based on these studies, the team identified three scalable 'good practices' for improving the continent's agriculture and food systems' resilience to climate change. Extensive literature reviews and in-country interviews with over 50 stakeholders from nonprofit, academic, multilateral, and private sector organizations provided the team with rich insights on country and continent-specific CSA successes, challenges, and areas for improvement. Across all three country case-studies, core 'cross-cutting' themes emerged, including: (i) the potential cross-sector partnerships to catalyze public sector inefficiencies, especially related to the provision of adequate extension services for CSA trainings; (ii) a need for improved market linkages of smallholders, especially to CSA inputs; and (iii) an imperative for CSA-specific policies and programs from public financing/extension agencies and multilateral/private implementers to align with comprehensive CSA knowledge and sharing of good practices to vulnerable farmers. Limitations of the study included (i) limited generalizability of CSA practices to diverse regional, climatic, socioeconomic and cultural contexts of African continent; (ii) overreliance on and subjectivity of qualitative data, also collected from a small sample; and (iii) inability to fully observe the sustainability of the CSA approaches that were analyzed.