Reaching out to smallholder farmers in developing countries with climate services: A literature review of current information delivery channels

Abstract

Climate services for smallholder farmers has increasingly been acknowledged to be one of the ways to build resilience by supporting adaptation to variable and changing climate. Providing climate services to smallholder farmers is however challenging and the information delivery channel is a crucial aspect of the communication chain that is often overlooked. We conducted a literature review of climate service initiatives that have been tested or implemented in developing countries to document past or on-going experiences and discuss potential ways forward as far as the climate information delivery channel is concerned. Our review highlights seventeen (17) papers, reporting on sixteen (16) climate service experiences from twelve (12) countries. Our results suggest that the most common weather information shared through climate services are rainfall, temperature and wind speed. Mobile phones are overly used to communicate weather information to smallholder farmers through different variants, including Short Message Services (SMS), calls, voice mail or the internet. While there is a clear trend that mobile phones offer many advantages over alternative channels such as radio and television, their effectiveness depends also on other factors such as the language and reliability of the climate information, the farmers’ literacy level and involvement in co-designing the services, the trust in the information provider and the response capacity of the farmers. To be relevant, mobile-based climate services need to be tailored to the socio-economic settings of the farmers.