Climate-Smart Agriculture Adoption and Institutional Support in North West Nigeria

This study examines the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices and the institutional support systems facilitating their uptake in North West Nigeria. Climate-smart agriculture encompasses practices that simultaneously improve productivity, build resilience to climate change, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The North West zone, facing increasing desertification, erratic rainfall, and heat stress, urgently needs widespread CSA adoption to sustain its agricultural productivity. This study uses a mixed-method design, combining surveys of 220 farmers in Kano, Sokoto, and Zamfara States with institutional mapping of CSA promotion programmes from government agencies, NGOs, and development partners. CSA practices assessed include drought-tolerant varieties, water harvesting, solar-powered irrigation, minimum tillage, and nitrogen-fixing cover crops. Institutional support quality, outreach reach, and coordination among CSA-promoting organisations are evaluated. Findings reveal that drought-tolerant variety adoption is the most widespread CSA practice, reaching 38 percent of sampled farmers, while water harvesting and solar irrigation adoption rates are below 10 percent due to capital cost constraints. Institutional coordination among CSA-promoting organisations is weak, with multiple agencies targeting the same communities while others remain unserved. The study concludes that CSA scaling in North West Nigeria requires better institutional coordination and financial support mechanisms. It recommends a regional CSA coordination platform and climate finance access facilitation for smallholder farmers.

Keywords: climate-smart agriculture, adoption, North West Nigeria, institutional support, agricultural resilience.