Credit constraint is considered by many as one of the key barriers to adoption of modern agricultural technologies, such as chemical fertilizer, improved seeds, and irrigation technologies, among smallholders. Past research and much policy discourse associates agricultural credit constraints with supply-side factors, such as limited access to credit sources or high costs of borrowing. However, demand-side factors, such as risk-aversion and financial illiteracy among borrowers, as well as high transaction costs, can also play important roles in credit-rationing for smallholders.

This working paper aims to provide recommendations and guidelines for climate services good practice. Building on CCAFS work and the broader academic literature, we distil knowledge and experience from interviews with project leaders and collaborators under Flagship 4, Climate Services and Safety Nets. Interviews provided information on designing, implementing and assessing climate services projects across the CCAFS regions; Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The programme “Linking agrobiodiversity value cahins, climate adaptation and nutrition: Empowering the poor to manage risk” funded by IFAD and the European Union from 2015 to 2018 aims to strenghten the capacities of farmers to manage risks associated with climate change, poor nutrition status, and economic disempowerment through agrobiodiversity-based solutions.

Smallholder farmers mostly depend on agriculture for their sustenance yet the sector is threatened by changing climate. It is essential for smallholders to adapt to reduce their vulnerability. Estimating the economic effectiveness of climate adaptation practices would enhance planning and actions among stakeholders and consequently impact policy. This study conducted an ex-ante in-depth empirical analysis of the costs and benefits of implementing five climate adaptation strategies identified among smallholder horticultural farmers in Ghana.

Cocoa and oil palm are the major commodity crops produced in Ghana and livelihood options for hundreds of thousands of rural households. However, their production has negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Certification standards have been promoted as a market-led mechanism to ensure their sustainable production. Even though food security does not feature in the theory of change of most certification standards, there are interesting intersections. This paper assesses the food security outcomes of certification adoption among cocoa and oil palm smallholders in Ghana.

As part of the CGIAR Initiative on Asian Mega Deltas, a scoping study was recently completed to prioritize key delta-oriented production systems and value chains for the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) in Cambodia (Gonsalves et al, 2022). Rice, vegetables, and inland fisheries were selected based on a set of criteria including production, economic and nutritional value, climate change impact, and potential benefit of climate services with specific attention for the role of women and smallholders.

Enhancing farmers' access to improved seeds is essential to increase productivity and ensure food security in the Global South. However, for many socially marginalized groups, seed access is constrained by the weak institutions governing the input supply chains and the dissemination of information.

Smallholder farmers grow a major share of the food consumed around
the world and preserve rich, biodiverse landscapes.1
But despite their
fundamental importance, many small farmers lead lives of deepening
vulnerability – caught between subsistence strategies threatened by
ecological degradation and commercial food systems that devalue them
as cheap labour. Alternative agricultural models are urgently needed.
One long-running movement still shows major untapped potential: that

Mango is one of the most important and popular fruit crops in Kenya. It is ranked second after bananas in monetary value (E4C, 2020) and is the third-leading horticultural crop in Kenya, with a total value of 8.6% (HCD, 2020). Since 2010, Kenya has been producing an average of 650,000 metric tons of mangoes annually, which generates an average of USD 84.4 million in gross production value. Recent statistics show that production has increased rapidly since the mid-2000s, growing at a rate of 9.2% per annum, correlating with the increases in mango exports.

To increase productivity and profitability, while limiting nutrient losses and related GHG-emissions, African smallholders need more tailored fertilizer advice. Yet, such advice critically hinges upon – largely lacking – field-level management data, as management is key to efficient fertilizer use. The Maize- Nutrient-Manager (MNM) mobile phone application enables collection of such data at scale, and directly converts this data into actionable advice for the farmer.

Despite increasing popularity of farmer-led irrigation in Ethiopia, little is known about socio-economics of farmers who receive public support in accelerating its expansion. We investigate this question by combining spatial land suitability for groundwater- and solar irrigation with pre-existing socioeconomic data. We find that if public support in farmer-led irrigation expansion were to be provided to farmers who own land areas that are also spatially highly suitable for irrigation, high-value crop cultivators and wealthier farmers would most likely benefit from such investments.

As part of the CGIAR initiative Asian Mega-Deltas, a scoping study was completed by the end of 2022 to prioritize key delta-oriented production systems and value chains in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Delta (Gonsalves et al. 2022). Rice, rice-fish and pulses production systems and value chains were selected based on a set of criteria including production, economic and nutritional value, climate change impact, and potential benefit of climate services with specific attention to the role of women and smallholders.