Effects of Climate-Smart Agriculture on Smallholder Farmers in the Eastern Province of Zambia

Abstract

Climate change is one of the distressful environmental challenges the world has been grappling with in recent times as it affects crop production, among other economic activities. The Eastern Province of Zambia has not been spared by crop failure resulting from climate-induced effects. As a result, the Zambia Integrated Forest Landscape Project (ZIFLP) implemented climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in the Eastern Province, from the first quarter of 2018 to the first quarter of 2024, which aimed to improve smallholder farmers' resilience to the effects of climate change on crop productivity. However, the effects of the CSA techniques on crop productivity were scientifically unclear. Therefore, this study used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the effects of CSA on crop productivity of the 106 smallholder farmers as questionnaire respondents and five District Agriculture Co-ordinators as key informants for interviews. The results revealed that all the respondents (100%) were aware of CSA in their communities, and about two-fifths (42%) of them, who formed the majority, practised crop rotation the most. Almost all the respondents (96%) viewed CSA as an important agricultural intervention in their communities in light of the adverse effects of climate change. Two-thirds (66%) of the respondents, who were the majority, acknowledge that the CSA techniques increased crop yield. The maize crop tonnage <i>Mean (M = 7.70)</i> after the respondents’ implementation of CSA was statistically significantly higher than the maize crop tonnage <i>Mean (M = 3.82)</i> before the respondents implemented CSA, signifying that the respondents produced more tonnage of maize crops after they implemented CSA than before. The study concludes that CSA in the Eastern Province of Zambia is an intervention through which smallholder farmers were helped to enhance their crop productivity in light of the devastating effects of climate change. Therefore, the study recommends continuity of financial and technical support of CSA by the Zambian government or cooperating partners or both; refresher training for smallholder farmers in CSA; and improvement in the agricultural extension system.