A Smart Solution to Increase Farmers’ Adaptive Capacity, Decision Support and Resilience to Climate Change (SOFADRIC)

In recent years, dealing with climate change impact on crop production is a major challenge faced by farmers globally. Nigeria’s case is of interest to us since the sector survive mainly on rain-fed agriculture.Traditionally, farmers’ decision support on climate change has depended on historical farm experience and farm peer pressure, while this may be limited in many ways, this method has failed as it has not incorporated scientific techniques and climate data driven solutions. Historical farm experience and farm peer pressure have led to massive crop failures due to climate variability in recent years. More so, most available data are raw and are not useful to farmers.

There is a need to develop smart solutions to build farmers adaptive capacity to deal with the challenge. We have developed a smart climate solution(data driven and downscaled for actionable climate advisory) engaging scientific climate data presented on two platforms to reach all categories of farmers. The SOFADRIC app is aweb/interactive SMS enabled platform set to provide crop farmers with climate change information to aid efficient annual farm level planning and decision making.