From national forecast to local action: Pilot for impact-based weather advisories
For a farmer watching the first rains arrive, the question is no longer simply whether rain is coming; it is whether there will be enough of it, for long enough, to make planting worthwhile. Therefore, weather and climate information play a critical role in Kenya’s agriculture and food security.
- Climate Action
- Climate-Smart Agriculture
- Kenya
- smallholder farmers
From national forecast to local action: Pilot for impact-based weather advisories
For a farmer watching the first rains arrive, the question is no longer simply whether rain is coming; it is whether there will be enough of it, for long enough, to make planting worthwhile. Therefore, weather and climate information play a critical role in Kenya’s agriculture and food security.
As seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasting continues to improve, including through emerging AI-based approaches, there is growing potential to provide farmers with more accurate, timely, and agriculturally relevant information.
To address this challenge, the Kenya Meteorological Service Authority (KMSA), together with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and the AIM4Scale partnership, launched a new pilot to turn advances in climate forecasting into practical agricultural advice for farmers. The pilot will test newly developed and validated rainy-season onset and sub-seasonal forecasting products and explore how to integrate them into advisory systems ahead of Kenya's 2026 short rains season.
The pilot is built around a simple but important question: how can better climate intelligence lead to better decisions on the farm?