An assessment of resilience of three selected small-scale irrigation schemes to climate change in Zimbabwe’s Midlands Province

Abstract

Despite the abundance of global frameworks on climate resilience in rainfed agricultural systems, there is limited scholarship on multi-dimensional resilience assessment in smallholder irrigation schemes in Zimbabwe. This paper applies a Climate Resilience Index (CRI) to assess climate resilience in 317 randomly selected farming household in Exchange, Insukamini and Ruchanyu irrigation schemes in Midlands Province, Zimbabwe. Overall, households in the schemes demonstrated moderate resilience to climate change-induced events, with an average CRI score ranging between 0.52 and 0.58. However, this moderate resilience status is significantly underpinned by low stability index (average 0.33) and low Income and Food Access index (averages 0.40). The beta and Tobit regression analysis revealed that the capability to build resilience is significantly and positively impacted by the marital status of the household head, household size and farming experience of the household head. It is therefore recommended that policy and practice focus on developing targeted, gender-sensitive support mechanisms (e.g. skills transfer and financial literacy) that leverage farmer experience and specifically address the critical constraints of financial capital and system stability to enhance the effectiveness of irrigation schemes to achieve food security in a changing climate.