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Credit access and perceived climate change resilience of smallholder farmers in semi-arid northern Ghana

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Abstract

While climate change is a global phenomenon, it has significantly stifled agricultural productivity in the Global South due to changes of key atmospheric elements including extreme temperatures and unpredictable rainfall over the last fifty years. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in sub-Saharan Africa where rainfed agriculture is the dominant livelihood strategy, climate change is increasingly undermining rural livelihoods. Despite several policy efforts to improve climate adaptation in this context, smallholders’ lack of access to credit constitutes one of the crucial dimensions of climatic vulnerability. Using an ordered logistic regression model, this study analyzed data from a cross-sectional survey (n = 1,100) in the Upper West Region to examine the relationship between smallholder farmers’ access to credit and their perceived climate change resilience. Findings show that households with access to credit from informal sources were more likely (OR = 1.73, p ≤ 0.05) to report good resilience compared to those without access. Households that received remittances were also more likely (OR = 3.26, p ≤ 0.001) to report good resilience compared to non-receiving households. Further, households that did not rear any livestock surprisingly emerged more likely (OR = 2.00, p ≤ 0.001) to report good resilience compared to those that reared livestock. On the contrary, households that had experienced any climatic events in the past 12 months before the study were less likely (OR = 0.29, p ≤ 0.01) to report good resilience compared to households that did not experience any events. These findings highlight the potential contribution of informal credit sources to improving rural agricultural productivity and climate change resilience. Informal credit sources may be capable of providing smallholder farmers with the needed access to more flexible financial credit options. The study provides policy recommendations on what might be useful to vulnerable groups, and others in similar contexts.

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Data availability

Due to ethical concerns, supporting data cannot be made openly available.

Notes

  1. Survey question from which the dependent variable was constructed:

    ‘How would you rate your ability to handle flood/drought/erratic rain related stress?’.

    This question was asked after respondents identified that they had adopted diverse coping strategies to climate related stresses they had experienced in the past 12 months prior to the survey.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Western Internal Social Science and Humanities Research Council for funding the fieldwork for this study. We also thank the research assistants and the smallholder farmers of the study districts.

Funding

This study was funded by Western Internal Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Explore grant (Grant Number: ROLA # 46416).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Environment, University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond St, London, ON, Canada

    Evans Sumabe Batung, Kamaldeen Mohammed & Isaac Luginaah

  2. Department of Geography, George Washington University, 2121 I St NW, Washington, DC, 20052, USA

    Moses Mosonsieyiri Kansanga

  3. Department of Geography & the Environment, University of Denver, 2050 East Iliff Avenue, Denver, CO, 80210, USA

    Hanson Nyantakyi-Frimpong

Authors
  1. Evans Sumabe Batung
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  2. Kamaldeen Mohammed
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  3. Moses Mosonsieyiri Kansanga
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  4. Hanson Nyantakyi-Frimpong
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  5. Isaac Luginaah
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the conception and design of the study. The corresponding author wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors reviewed, edited, and commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Evans Sumabe Batung.

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The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

Ethical approval was granted by the Non-Medical Research Board of the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

Informed consent

Consent was obtained from all respondents in their preferred dialects concerning the purpose and use of their data, prior to the administration of the survey.

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Batung, E., Mohammed, K., Kansanga, M.M. et al. Credit access and perceived climate change resilience of smallholder farmers in semi-arid northern Ghana. Environ Dev Sustain 25, 321–350 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-021-02056-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-021-02056-x

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