Scaling Up Climate-Smart Agricultural (CSA) Solutions for Smallholder Cereals and Livestock Farmers in Zambia

Abstract

The project to scale up climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in Zambia is an example of a partnership between public, private, and research institutions to address impact of climate change. It aims to contribute to improve smallholder farmers’ resilience to climatic shocks through a number of innovative multilayer CSA interventions. These include increased access and use of stress tolerant maize seeds by linking farmers and agro-dealers to stress tolerant seed suppliers, increased access and use of ICT-enabled weather information services by farmers, increased and sustained private sector investment in weather index insurance (WII) and farmer’s uptake, and promotion of integrated crop-livestock farming systems. This chapter presents some successes that have been recorded to scale up the interventions through the project: a total of 331 camp extension officers and 132 agro-dealers were trained; 3591 smallholder farmers attended seed fairs held; and 25,632 farmers have been reached with ICT-enabled weather and agronomic practices information services in the 12 districts of Zambia. It also presents challenges, opportunities, and synergies of the partnership in CSA solutions offerings. It emphasizes that private sector investments in CSA and smallholder farmer uptake are hinged on market facilitation approach. Preliminary results show that farmers are willing to embrace CSA solutions, and this is useful in designing CSA solution platforms.