Understanding gender dimensions of agriculture and climate change in smallholder farming communities

TLDR

Smallholders are changing practices in response to climate and environmental shifts, yet women face greater barriers from financial constraints, male-dominated information flows, labor-intensive strategies, and limited forecast credibility, and the climate analogue approach—identifying nearby villages with successful CSA adoption—offers a promising tool for farmer‑to‑farmer learning. The study seeks to move beyond treating women as a homogeneous vulnerable group in CSA programmes by highlighting the climate analogue approach as a promising tool for farmer‑to‑farmer learning. The authors employed participatory tools across Uganda, Ghana, and Bangladesh to conduct socio‑economic and gender analyses of climate‑smart agriculture, climate analogue approaches, and weather forecasting. The participatory tools yielded policy‑ and programme‑relevant results and provided some insights into women’s adaptive capacity, though they were insufficient to fully address women’s specific vulnerabilities in CSA programmes.

Abstract

In Uganda, Ghana and Bangladesh, participatory tools were used for a socio-economic and gender analysis of three topics: climate-smart agriculture (CSA), climate analogue approaches, and climate and weather forecasting. Policy and programme-relevant results were obtained. Smallholders are changing agricultural practices due to observations of climatic and environmental change. Women appear to be less adaptive because of financial or resource constraints, because of male domination in receiving information and extension services and because available adaptation strategies tend to create higher labour loads for women. The climate analogue approach (identifying places resembling your future climate so as to identify potential adaptations) is a promising tool for increasing farmer-to-farmer learning, where a high degree of climatic variability means that analogue villages that have successfully adopted new CSA practices exist nearby. Institutional issues related to forecast production limit their credibility and salience, particularly in terms of women's ability to access and understand them. The participatory tools used in this study provided some insights into women's adaptive capacity in the villages studied, but not to the depth necessary to address women's specific vulnerabilities in CSA programmes. Further research is necessary to move the discourse related to gender and climate change beyond the conceptualization of women as a homogenously vulnerable group in CSA programmes.