Because 70 percent of Nigeria’s population is active in agriculture as a primary occupation, climate change has a direct impact on the livelihoods of most people in the country. Access to microcredit can play a key role in farmers adapting to climate change because adaptation measures tend to be costly. Meanwhile, farmers in Nigeria are largely credit-constrained, often having access to loans only from informal sources such as relatives and neighbors.
Data from 320 rice farmers collected during 2021 indicate that those with access to formal microcredit adopt more climate change adaptation strategies than those without such access: an average of approximately seven strategies versus four strategies, respectively. The study also found that membership in farmers’ associations and having non-agricultural sources of income increased the number of climate change adaptation strategies that farmers use. These strategies include using higher quality seeds, using mulch to conserve soil moisture, adjusting planting dates and improving irrigation systems.
In terms of productivity, the farmers with more access to microcredit attained markedly higher rice yields. Larger farm sizes and higher levels of education also had positive impacts on rice yield, while yields were lower among older farmers and farmers with larger household sizes.
In conclusion, the authors recommend that policymakers: (1) support the establishment of affordable microcredit schemes to ease farmers’ liquidity constraints, such as via farmers’ associations; and (2) prioritize serving farmers who are younger and who have higher levels of education because members of these groups tend to have more potential to generate higher yields.
This is a summary of a paper by Adejoke Yewande Bakare, Ayodeji Sunday Ogunleye and Ayodeji Damilola Kehinde; forthcoming in World Development Sustainability; June 2023; 18 pages; available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772655X2300006X.
By Vaughn Rajah, Research Associate
Additional Resources
World Development Sustainability webpage
https://www.elsevier.com/locate/wds
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