Farmers’ Uses of Indigenous Knowledge and Practices to Cope with Climate Change in Kilifi County, Kenya

Abstract

Farmers in Kilifi County (located along the Kenyan Coast) suffer from the effects of climate change, such as floods and extended droughts, yet their adaptive capacity remains low due to high poverty rates and unreliable weather forecasting information. In this context, traditional knowledge and practices provide an important informal and, to some extent, time-tested basis for dealing in part with the challenges of climate change. This paper highlights some of the indigenous adaptation and mitigation strategies that farmers in Kilifi County have reported to use to infer changes in weather patterns and to cope with the effects of climate change. The challenges and limitations they faced with the use of this knowledge are discussed. This paper recommends the integration of Indigenous knowledge into formal climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies in order to provide farmers with sustainable farming strategies that are contextually and culturally rich. Second, the need for financial support for farmers to access sustainable technologies such as seeds for planting drought-resistant crops is highlighted.