As part of our climate smart agriculture (CSA) approach, 2SCALE organized a training in Sokoto State, Nigeria aimed at helping smallholder farmers to avoid wastage of inputs and produce during key farming seasons. The training focused on how to use mobile phones to get daily weather forecasts in their locality. Initially 15 youths from the Agricultural Graduates Association of Nigeria (AGAN) were selected to receive the training, they then introduced the use of localized weather forecasting to a total of 575 smallholder onion farmers, at community level across eight clusters.
October 25, 2019
575 Nigerian farmers introduced to climate smart agriculture
Early in 2019, 2SCALE and Ignitia Technologies signed an MoU aimed at delivering digital weather forecast services. This initiative is part of the collaboration between the two organizations. Prior to the farmer training, AGAN youths were recruited, trained and deployed to collect farmers’ names, mobile numbers and farm locations - including GPS coordinates.
After their training, farmers were able to read the weather forecast messaging received via their mobile phones, in their local language of Hausa.
The overall aim of this training is to ensure that onion farmers become more acquainted with the reality of weather and climate change in their region and properly align their farming activities with climate smart agriculture to address some of the emerging challenges.
The use of the local language, such as Hausa, in communicating by mobile ensured that farmers properly understood and utilized the weather information that they received via their phones. After the training, farmers highlighted the importance of accessing this localized and timely information:
We found that the weather prediction from the SMS corresponds with the reality of what's happening in our local community
Climate Smart Agriculture is an innovative concept in agriculture that helps to transform and re-orient agricultural systems to effectively support development and ensure food security in a changing climate. It aims to tackle three main objectives: sustainability to increase agricultural income and productivity; to adapt and build resilience to climate change, and where possible to reduce and/or remove greenhouse gas emissions.