Building Climate Resilience Using Household-Level Data
January 2025
The Nasio Trust has been working with rural communities in Western Kenya for over twenty-years.
For the past six years, we have supported small-scale farmers to make the best use of their small parcels of land so that they can become food secure. While our efforts and interventions have empowered farmers to increase their crop yields, pay for their children’s school fees, and meet most of their nutritional requirements, the impact of climate change is wreaking havoc on rural economies. Extreme weather conditions and erratic rainfall are changing the agricultural landscape as growing seasons contract and crops fail. Farmers have to increasingly fend attacks from pests like army worm and invasive weeds.
In 2024, Nasio embarked on a mission of ensuring that the community we work in is armed with necessary tools and adaptation strategies to tackle the changing climate around them
In 2024, Nasio embarked on a mission of ensuring that the community we work in is armed with necessary tools and adaptation strategies to tackle the changing climate around them. As part of our efforts, we have partnered with Evidence For Development, a UK Based Research Charity, specialising in the household economy approach to collect data at the household level.
Increasing stresses brought about by climate change have made it imperative for charities like Nasio to have accurate and localised data on the needs of the community. Evidence For Development trained Nasio’s staff in the Individual Household Methodology Survey Approach in July 2024, who then conducted a survey on all aspects of household economy in a local village providing an analysis of current livelihoods and a basis for monitoring the impact of Nasio’s work across the community. Three participants from our partner institutions – Pamoja CBO (Kisumu), Chui Mamas (Samburu), and Amuka Foundation (Marsabit) were also trained to cascade this methodology to other grassroots organisations.
The survey highlighted key areas of deprivation within the Mumias West community. Despite being a rain-fed and fertile region of Kenya, Buchirinya village selected for the survey was home to several households that lived well below the $1 per day poverty line threshold set by the World Bank. 16% of the households cannot meet their food energy requirements either through their own crops or through surplus income in spite of Nasio’s support with farm inputs, education and healthcare. The findings from the report will allow Nasio to design strategic ways of reducing poverty in Western Kenya.
To implement the learnings from the report, we will be working with the Walker Institute based at the University of Reading to help farmers and other vulnerable groups predict their risk to climate change and devise appropriate ways of combatting them.
This story is listed in: Achievements, Climate Change, Food Security, Projects