Farmers lend a hand in climate change resilience

By Bonface ORUCHO

It is mid-morning in Mbale, Vihiga County, Kenya, the atmosphere is bustling with activity. Women are arranging bundles of sukuma wiki and tomatoes into crates while three men inspect the beehives that buzz softly at the farm’s edge.

Once a midsized solar pump is activated, it transports water via narrow tubes that wind between columns of vegetables.

This is the Vihiga Mixed Farmers’ Cooperative, composed of 24 families overseeing 12 hectares of diverse crops and bee species. They cultivate vegetables, maintain beehives, and care for passion fruit vines that ascend the hills behind their houses.

“We keep everything running by ourselves,” explains Maryanne Waswa, the cooperative chair, flipping through a small ledger covered in neat handwriting. “For example, we recently experienced a water pump breakdown and you see when that happens, the vegetables die. Nobody else pays for such.”

Every season, the team pools resources to sustain their irrigation systems, purchase drought-resistant seeds, and upgrade equipment harmed by erratic weather. It is expensive, yet they have limited options.

“When a season does poorly, we forfeit not just our harvest, it drops down to us delaying to pay school fees, others opt for short-term loans. It becomes an additional expense that directly impacts our finances,” Emmanuel Wanyonyi, the group’s secretary general, explained.

Throughout Africa, millions of farmers similar to Waswa and Wanyonyi’s group are funding their own climate resilience. They allocate resources to water tanks, soil restoration, and innovative seed types with minimal or no outside assistance.

The extent of that self-financing is now apparent in recent research by Climate Focus, created by the Family Farmers for Climate Action coalition, which represents 95 million small-scale producers throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific.

The report estimates that smallholders worldwide need about US$443 billion every year to adapt to climate change. Yet, current global spending that actually reaches them covers less than 1% of that need. Most adaptation finance is routed through big international agencies, and very little trickles down to the farms where the real work happens.

In Africa alone, the financing gap is stark. According to the report, smallholders in East Africa require US$34.6 billion annually to strengthen a sector that supports over 75% of the region’s employment.

In West Africa, US$11.1 billion is needed each year to protect the livelihoods of nearly 2 million cocoa farmers, whose output underpins Europe’s US$50 billion chocolate industry.

In Southern Africa, an annual US$13.2 billion is required to avert drought-driven crop failures that left 21 million children malnourished in 2023–24, while North Africa needs US$8.9 billion to safeguard food production from climate shocks such as the 2022–23 drought that slashed Tunisia’s cereal harvest by 70%.

Central Africa faces its own challenge, requiring US$2.9 billion each year to restore and protect the Congo Basin, the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest, through sustainable and resilient farming. The scale of these figures underscores the burden shouldered by farmers who receive little support but remain vital to food security across the continent.

Instead, smallholders are filling the gap themselves. According to the same analysis, they already spend about US$368 billion a year from their own income on adaptation measures. For many, this means giving up between 20 and 40 percent of what they earn to stay productive.

The numbers show a clear imbalance. In the same year that smallholders spent US$368 billion on adaptation, governments around the world paid out US$470 billion in farm subsidies that often harm the environment. The contradiction is striking.

“Farmers are already paying for resilience,” says Elizabeth Nsimadala, president of the Eastern Africa Farmers Federation. “What we need is not sympathy but investment.”

That is the message Africa’s farmer federations are taking to COP30 in Brazil, where adaptation finance will dominate the agenda.

Led by the Pan-African Farmers’ Organisation (PAFO), which brings together regional bodies from across the continent, they are demanding a system that sends climate finance directly to those who need it. Less than 2% of global climate funds currently reach African farmers, and the federations want that to change.

According to Babafemi Oyewole, the CEO of PAFO, their proposal is to create a Farmers Resilience Fund that channels money directly to farmer organisations and cooperatives.

“We also want to build in transparency, gender inclusion, and flexible risk-sharing tools… Pair grants with low-interest loans so that farmers can invest without sinking into debt and make farmer groups part of the decision-making and monitoring process, not just the end beneficiaries.”

PAFO aims to have this fund initiated at COP30, commencing with US$100 million in initial capital from donors, development banks, and African nations.

The fund would support hands-on, farm-based initiatives such as small-scale irrigation systems, seed repositories, community insurance schemes, and soil rehabilitation projects.

The goal is to transform farmers from being borrowers into partners within the climate finance framework. Across the continent, small examples already point to what direct access could achieve. Close to the border with western Kenya, Vihiga and Kisumu county governments are setting up community seed banks and small-scale irrigation projects meant to boost local agricultural value chains.

Vihiga County was also involved in funding a seed bank and processing plant in 2024 under its new policy on agroecology, creating an official market for native seed varieties and local processors. Today, there are certified seed sources for over 8,000 smallholder farmers in Kisumu, through the Kabudi-Agoro and Nyando seed banks, funded by county resources and research partners.

In Nigeria, such programmes as the Pay-at-Harvest model of Leadway Assurance supported by AGRA and index-based livestock insurance by Africa Re provide small-scale farmers with financial security against floods, drought and crop failures.

Their combined efforts now cover less than 50,000 farmers in the country of some 35 million, which highlights the fact that coverage is still minimal despite an increasing demand for climate-risk protection.

For Waswa and her cooperative in Mbale, those large global figures feel remote, yet their significance is palpable. Each season, they document their income, their expenditures, and their losses due to unpredictable weather.

Each receipt demonstrates that smallholders are investing in climate action, by fixing one broken pipe and one repaired pump at a time.

“More money for us will mean we will concentrate less on survival and more on expansion,” Waswa expressed.

The bees would continue to buzz and the vines would persist in climbing.

The COP 30 (30th Conference of the Parties) will be held from 10 to 21 November 2025 in the city of Belém in the state of Pará, Brazil.