Assessment of education needs for climate change adaptation among farmers of Mbale district

Abstract

In Africa, agriculture is largely rain fed and therefore vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This is through the frequent and prolonged dry spells, drought, floods and increased incidences of pests and disease. In order for farmers to adapt effectively, they need to be knowledgeable on how to deal with these impacts and also change their attitudes to effectively adapt and cope with climate change. To be able to do this, it is important to establish the climate change knowledge capacity needs that farmers have so as to design locally appropriate interventions. The objectives of this study were therefore to; i) assess the attitudes of farmers towards climate change adaptation strategies, and ii) determine the knowledge required by farmers to adapt to climate change. The study employed cross sectional survey design, where 90 randomly selected households from Mbale district, Nyondo Sub County were interviewed. As a response to drought, few respondents did not know about the following: mixed farming 14.2%, agroforestry 12.6%, tree planting 12.3%, and planting cover crops 9.6%. For the case of responses to too much rainfall, only26% of the respondents were knowledgeable about digging channels in gardens, 18%planting on ridges, 14.7% keeping animals indoors, and 9.2% water harvesting. About ninety five percent of the respondents were not knowledgeable about changing crop variety as a response to climate change. Other responses to climate that respondents were least knowledgeable about were, changing plant dates (96%), reducing number of livestock (97%), re-use of waste water (99.5%) Whereas the majority (90%) of the respondents had knowledge about post-harvest techniques, water harvesting, agroforestry, mulching, planting cover crops and digging channels, they did not practice them claiming they were not useful. Given the results of the study that show that majority of respondents were not knowledgeable on the basic adaptation technics on addition to harboring negative attitudes towards practicing some of them, there is urgent need for more sensitization and training to improve on their ability to adapt their farming activities to cope and adapt to climate change.