Climate change and small-scale agriculture in Africa: Does indigenous knowledge matter? Insights from Kenya and South Africa

Africa is highly vulnerable to changes in global climatic conditions due to its low adaptive capacity and sensitivity to changes in climatic variables, particularly in the agricultural sector. A key attribute of studies on climate change coping strategies and adaptation mechanisms in Africa is that they lack local specificity. Within a discourse dominated by large-scale attempts to measure the extent of climate change and its impacts with methods drawn from physical and biological sciences, there is little focus on how locally-specific knowledge and practices help communities to cope with effects of adverse environmental conditions on their agriculture at the farm level. From a sample of 115 respondents drawn from South Africa and Kenya and through interviews, discussions and interactions, this paper demonstrates that local residents deploy their indigenous knowledge in predicting seasonal weather and rainfall patterns, determining wind speed and direction, preserving grains for planting purposes and various traditional farming support systems to lessen the impacts of climate change on their agricultural activities. The paper concludes that merging local knowledge with modern science in Africa could help develop a syncretic agronomical knowledge amongst farmers in handling climate change.