Climate services for women vegetable growers: exploring new avenues for building resilience to climate risks in rural Senegal

DESCRIPTION: Climate variability and change is exacerbating the risks that many rural populations face due to low agricultural productivity, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Effective climate services could build resilience among smallholder farmers. However, the impacts that climate services have on measures of adaptation such as livelihoods, food security, nutrition, and health are largely unknown. Lack of evidence hampers the development of effective climate services and investments in scaling up those services. This project combines expertise from climate science, economics, nutrition and anthropology to provide preliminary evidence about potential effectiveness of new climate services for women in horticulture in Senegal. Based on this pilot project, the team will develop a larger proposal to (1) implement a climate information service designed using the results of the pilot study, and (2) rigorously evaluate the impacts of the information service in order to guide the scale-up and the design of climate information services for women farmers in horticulture in Senegal and elsewhere. Tailoring climate services for women may open new opportunities in advancing adaptation since improving the purchasing power of women impacts household livelihoods differently than does improving the purchasing power of men. Horticulture is particularly well-placed to address prevalent nutritional deficiencies.