Baseline Assessment for Climate Victims to Climate Heroes Project

Overview

Baseline for the 'From Climate Victims to Climate Heroes' project. The project aims to make 50,000 smallholder coffee farmers in Kenya (Trans Nzoia and Bungoma counties) and Uganda (Elgon, Northern, Central, West Nile, South West and Western regions) more resilient through three pillars: carbon farming, carbon finance and carbon trading. The study looked at coffee incomes and production, climate challenges, practices that raise or reduce greenhouse gas emissions, climate-smart practices, and farmers' awareness of and participation in carbon markets. It surveyed cooperative members, estate farmers, wet mills and other stakeholders, and set benchmarks for the project's M&E framework.

Key findings

• Coffee farming is dominated by older men: 69% of Ugandan and 74% of Kenyan respondents were male, and the over-60 age group was the largest in both countries.
• Most Kenyan coffee farmers earned less than KES 50,000 a year from coffee and most Ugandan farmers less than UGX 1,348,500. Most Kenyan smallholders interviewed said their coffee income fell by 4.1% from 2020 to 2022, while 8.3% reported an increase.
• Cherry production was about 500 kg per farmer in Kenya and about 1,150 kg in Uganda. Most farms had fewer than 500 mature trees, and in Kenya most trees were young.
• About 90% of Kenyan farmers belonged to cooperatives (10% were estate owners). 98% of Kenyan smallholders had other on-farm enterprises, and 100% in Uganda had taken up agroforestry, beekeeping or maize and beans to supplement coffee income.
• All respondents in both countries (100%) were aware of climate change challenges. Prolonged drought was the top problem, followed by more pests and diseases. Deforestation, poor waste management at wet mills and continuous tillage were seen as the main sources of emissions.
• 268 Ugandan smallholders (83%) and 32 Kenyan smallholders (67%) were not involved in carbon trading; 16 Kenyan respondents (33%) were. 75% of respondents named Solidaridad as a carbon-trading player, through its link with Rabobank and the Acorn platform.
• Agroforestry, followed by cover crops, was the leading carbon-sequestration measure in both countries. The most-cited carbon-trading barriers were lack of trainers and knowledge, low trust, poor record keeping and small farm size.

In figures

Recommendations

• Provide more training on the remaining carbon trade modules, delivered interactively at cooperative level, covering benefits and required practices.
• Set up community nurseries for tree seedlings to intercrop with coffee, and provide improved, disease-resistant coffee seedlings at subsidised prices through cooperative nurseries.
• Train smallholders on climate-smart agriculture, GAP, GMP and the site-specific stepwise (SCP) approach.
• Promote county coffee platforms and farmer-to-farmer extension as policy lobby forums.
• Form county climate change boards to legislate on greenhouse gases and carbon trading, using the 2% county climate change funds.
• Group farmers into village associations to reach the roughly 10 ha minimum needed to benefit from carbon trading.
• Advocate for youth and women in coffee farming and support record keeping and digitalisation of the sector.

Lessons learned

• Small farm size (about 0.5 ha against a minimum of about 10 ha) is the main barrier to individual smallholders earning from carbon credits. Aggregating farmers is a precondition for the carbon-trading pillar.
• Farmers were reluctant to share information because earlier surveys never gave them feedback, and some expected benefits that had not been explained.

Methodology

Mixed methods: a household questionnaire for smallholder and estate coffee farmers (target sample 380, set with the Yamane formula through multistage stratified and simple random sampling), a wet-mill questionnaire, key informant interviews, focus group discussions and a desk review. Data were analysed in SPSS.

Limitations

• Farmers were reluctant to give information because they never received feedback from earlier surveys.
• Farmers had higher expectations because earlier survey teams had not explained their purpose.
• Farmers had limited knowledge of carbon trading, and the project was still at an early stage.
• Smallholders keep no farm expenditure records and often do not know their production or farm size, which limits cost and yield data.