As droughts worsen, phones and radios lead way to water for Niger’s herders
When Moumouni Abdoulaye and his fellow herders in western Niger used to set off on scouting missions in search of water, they feared for their livestock - and for their own lives. Unable to rely anymore on their traditional methods of predicting the weather amid increasingly erratic droughts and floods, and lacking modern climate information, they struggled to predict where, and when, they might find water in the vast arid region.
“We were living in limbo. Without knowledge, we constantly risked our lives,” said Abdoulaye, seeking shade under a tree from the fierce midday sun in Niger’s Tillabery region. But a project to involve the region’s semi-nomadic people in the production of locally-specific, real-time weather forecasts - and provide them with radios and mobile phones to receive and share the information - is transforming the lives of tens of thousands of Nigeriens like Abdoulaye.
“Now we receive daily updates about rainfall, can call other communities to ask if they have had rain, and plan our movements accordingly,” Abdoulaye said. In Niger, as across much of Africa’s Sahel region, frequent droughts have impoverished many people and made it much harder to make a living from agriculture. That is happening in a West African country already consistently ranked at the bottom of the UN Human Development Index.
With climate change now exacerbating pressures, experts say there is a growing and urgent need for better climate information, to ensure farmers and pastoralists are equipped to cope with unpredictable rainfall and climate shocks. Across Africa, only limited climate data is collected and made available and information services are often not well understood, user-friendly, or followed up to help people put the information to use in adapting to climate threats, experts say.
Ensuring that communities play a role - alongside state and aid agencies - in generating and sharing weather information is the best way to get them to use it and to build their resilience to the growing pressures, said Blane Harvey of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). “Co-participation is very powerful because people will buy into a service if they’ve had a hand in producing it,” he said. “Crucially, they bring in their local knowledge, which helps to downscale and triangulate more regionalized forecasts,” added Harvey, a research associate at the London-based thinktank.
Collaboration crucial
A lack of weather stations across Africa means that forecasts, produced by national meteorological agencies, tend to be too broad to be of much use at a local level. But a project launched in 2015, funded by the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) and led by CARE International, is trying to improve the quality of and access to climate data for farmers and pastoralists in western Niger. CARE’s project under the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) program aims to help 450,000 people become better prepared for climate shocks, including through giving them access to better forecasts.
The goal is to help them diversify their farming and find ways of making money which are not so heavily impacted by climate change, in order to better withstand climate pressures. For farmer Adamou Soumana, improved access to climate information has given his village a better understanding of the weather shocks they are encountering, and the confidence to adopt resilience boosting strategies such as using climate-adapted seeds, finding sustainable ways to harvest forest products, and storing harvests.
“Previously, if it rained in January, we rushed to plant our crops thinking the rainy season starts when in fact it never comes before May,” he said. “Now we understand climate shocks, and can plan our activities in advance. We feel more resilient,” he said. The BRACED project has helped communities by acting as a broker between them and meteorological agencies, and ensuring agency partners are trained to interpret climate data, translate it into local languages and help people to make sense of the forecasts. — Reuters