Building resilience through conservation agriculture in Ghana: The FAO’s SHARP+ Approach

Abstract

Building farm system resilience through the adoption of conservation agriculture (CA) is seen as a panacea to tackle the problem of climate change, environmental degradation and population growth because family farmers, whose livelihoods depend largely on rainfed agriculture, are constantly living in near crisis conditions. The FAO’s SHARP+; the ‘Self and Holistic Assessment of climate Resilience of farmers and Pastoralists’ tool, was used to assess the resilience of farmers who were trained in conservation agriculture, as part of a food and nutrition security enhancement project. Results showed that trained farmers were generally more resilient in comparison to their untrained counterparts. Full-scale adoption of the CA technique was however found to be lacking, primarily due to the absence of intrinsic motivation on the part of the farmers. A strong and positive correlation was found to exist between intrinsic motivation and adoption, whilst adoption itself had the same relationship with resilience. The study recommends a stimulation of farmers’ intrinsic motivation to foster better uptake of conservation agriculture, which will in turn strengthen their farm system resilience.