

Jane Gicheha collecting rainwater data on the farm. CIAT is working with partners including the Kenyan Water Resource Management Authority (WRMA) and The Nature Conservancy among others to support farmers along the watershed to better manage their land, preventing soil erosion - which clogs up the waterways for other users further downstream.
Our activities focus on improving the quality of climate information services and climate-smart agriculture in Kenya, while increasing access to and use of these resources for women and youth.
We’re facilitating collaboration between Kenya's public and private sectors to develop tailored climate information services and digital agricultural advisory services that are gender and socially inclusive.
By improving how markets function for farmers under climate change and developing user-friendly crop forecasting systems (with a focus on loss and yield) with accessible digital tools and interfaces, AICCRA Kenya is ensuring that useable and actionable information is reaching farmers in an inclusive way.
“As women, we are the breadwinners of our households, so we pay keen interest to our household food security, nutritional needs, and productivity of our farms…we should always be given the priority to be the first to learn from technologies that improve smallholder farming as you have done through this AICCRA project”.
Phoebe Mwangagi, a Lead Farmer on AICCRA CSA demonstration farm, Makueni County
Strengthening climate services for farmers through AgDataHubs
AICCRA researchers, with national and international partners, are synthesizing climate and agriculture data to produce climate-agricultural advisories that are more accurate and context-specific.
Harvested information is fed into AICCRA’s Agricultural Data (AgData) Hub, which is processed by the Intelligent Agricultural Systems Advisory Tool (iSAT) to generate ward and crop-specific advisories.
Output messages from iSAT are broadcast via SMS to over 73,000 farmers, extensionists, and pastoralists through Mercy Corp’s AgriFin platform, agricultural value chain management software SourceTrace, and the Kenya Agricultural Observatory Platform (KAOP), run by Kenya’s Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization.
Farmers and pastoralists in Kenya now have access to advisories that provide actionable advice on agricultural land preparation, planting time, livestock markets, rainfall events, and dry periods.
The power of partnerships for collaborative transformation
AICCRA Kenya works closely with a number of partners who specialize in arid and semi-arid regions:
Enabling women and persons with disabilities to lead farmer demonstrations to scale the uptake of climate-smart agriculture in Kenyan communities
In Kenya, household farming activities in 'Arid and Semi-Arid' (ASAL) regions are mostly led by women, who—despite being on the frontline of the climate challenge—are often at risk of being excluded from agricultural technology transfers.
Guided by World Bank's Environmental and Social Framework (ESF) standard on the assessment and management of environmental and social risk, the AICCRA team in Kenya together with ICRISAT assessed and prioritized the inclusion of farmers who may be at risk of exclusion in the transfer of CSA technologies in Makueni, Kitui, and Taita Taveta counties.
The emphasis on these measures and the flexibility of the project to accommodate them has inspired progress in locally-led, bottom-up learning to scale CSA. Five of the nine local Agricultural Extension Officers (AEOs)—employed by the Kenyan government and engaged by the project to transfer and interact with the famers on the CSA technologies—are women.
Building on outcomes for a climate-smart future for Kenyan farmers
“For us to crunch data of the scale that we have at Kenya Meteorological Department, we need good hardware, and this is exactly what (AICCRA) has done; they have filled our data processing gap.”
Onesmus Ruirie, Assistant Director, Data Management Services, KMD (Read more)
To learn more about AICCRA Kenya's activities, please contact:
David Ngome, Communications Specialist - D.W.Ngome@cgiar.org