Community-based adaptation to climate change in Africa: a typology of information and institutional requirements for promoting uptake of existing adaptation technologies

It is predicted that climate change will make some parts of Africa generally drier and other parts generally wetter. Even if these general trends hold, long-term rainfall predictions for any particular area in Africa are very uncertain. What is much more certain, however, is that all parts of Africa will be subject to more extreme day-to-day and season-to-season fluctuations in rainfall. This means that African farmers will need to adapt to more extreme and erosive storms, greater likelihood of flood, longer periods of drought, and generally less certain conditions for food and agricultural production. There are a number of technologies –particularly those focused on water managementthat are likely to have greater relevance for Africa’s agriculture in the coming years and decades. This paper describes known adaptation technologies including inter alia crop improvement, water harvesting and their associated informational and institutional requirements. Some of the informational requirements for include giving the right information in the right package to farmers as well as establishing or strengthening institutions to ensure their scaling up. This ensures the necessary information and institutional ‘architecture’ for scaling up the use of these technologies by a larger community of African farmers. The pursuit and promotion of agricultural technologies by focusing on information and institutional needs will require strategic policy and institutional development within a system of global governance that links effectively with national and community-level adaptation iniatives. Finally we review the existing informational and institutional gaps, challenges and the way forward with the hope that these will catalyze a re-look at community-based adaptation, increased investment in adaptation and consideration of community-based adaptation as part of the global response in addressing the potential effects of climatic variability and climate change.