By Arame Tall
Climate information can be a powerful tool in helping rural communities adapt to climate risk. But not all information is created equal, nor is access to information equal. To understand the value of climate information in these communities better, researchers started out by asking: does climate information matter to women farmers? The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), in conjunction with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and CGIAR Centers, has engaged in projects to deliver climate services to smallholder farmers across Africa and South Asia.
The recently released Monitoring and Evaluation framework for participatory assessment summarizes a new contextual and gender-responsive framework to assess the added value of climate information and advisory services for smallholder farming communities across the developing world. The proposed M&E is based on three primary goals for conducting an evaluation of climate services for farmers: 1) to inform design of a new climate service project; 2) to identify gaps in climate service delivery as well as improve project effectiveness and service delivery quality; and 3) to assess impact of provided services for farmers, hypothesized to benefit from the climate service.
A multi-step process is developed for climate service impact evaluation, including a pre-assessment (PA) toolkit of ethnographic and evaluative tools, followed by guidelines for baseline data collection, monitoring, and evaluation of climate service projects. The drive to develop a tool to assess the concrete value of climate services for farmers grew out of an expert meeting jointly hosted by CCAFS, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Climate Services Partnership and Senegal’s Meteorological Agency (ANACIM) back in May 2013.
The PA toolkit builds understanding of contextual issues that constrain or enable the usefulness of climate information services in the communities, such as information about farmer’s decision-making, socio-economic and cultural constraints behind behavioral changes, and gender roles and norms within a given community. Once such understanding of farmers’ decision-making context is determined, evaluators will be better equipped to define a contextualized impact pathway of climate information for rural farmers.
Based on the results of PA, researchers design surveys to measure how information is used currently (at the baseline), how this changes over time with the provision of climate advisories through a climate services project (monitoring), how all this adds up to impact farmer decision-making and, ultimately, how well they make a living from farming (evaluation). The toolkit also includes a strong gender component so that evaluators can determine if, how, and why women are or are not receiving and using climate services.
It is hoped that this framework will help evaluators and project designers determine if, how, when and under which conditions climate services are impacting farmers’ key livelihood decisions during their cropping season. The framework will also illuminate how climate services are impacting farming practices under uncertain climate conditions so that farmers can improve local management of climate-related risks at the farm level.
Download: Does climate information matter? Evaluating climate services for farmers: a proposed monitoring and evaluation framework for participatory assessment of the impact of climate services for male and female farmers. CCAFS Working Paper no. 69. Tall A, Davis A, Agrawal, S. 2014.
About the author: Arame Tall works as a researcher for Theme Climate Risk Management with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).
