Understanding Farmer Resilience and Behaviour Change through SHARP+ in Drylands

The Self-evaluation and Holistic Assessment of Climate Resilience of Farmers and Pastoralists (SHARP+) methodology has been selected by the Drylands Sustainable Landscapes Impact Program (DSL-IP), to support its mandate towards achieving Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) in drylands. The SHARP+ was implemented in five different countries, along with other data collection methods, such as remote sensing as part of the Integrated Landscape Assessment Methodology (ILAM). By collecting household-level data, the SHARP+ tool provides detailed and context-specific information on agroecosystem’s resilience and agricultural practices within Drylands, ensuring that stakeholders have access to accurate, relevant and timely data for informed decision making.

The SHARP+ tool was first used during the project preparation phase and later at the project’s start to establish a baseline in Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, the United Republic of Tanzania and Zimbabwe to identify: i) Vulnerabilities in smallholder farming systems, ii) Current adaptive capacities of farming households and iii) Farmer behaviors towards specific agricultural practices.

To align with the project’s goals, the SHARP+ tool has been adapted to include a Behaviour Change Assessment, focused on understanding the capabilities, opportunities and motivations related to specific agricultural practices. The core themes studied also identified as ‘best practices’ varied depending on the countries to align with local priorities and create contextually relevant models for scaling.

The results from the SHARP+ implementation in Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, the United Republic of Tanzania and Zimbabwe, are now available in country-specific five factsheets, highlighting current household’s resilience level, gender insights as well as behavior related to practices such as intercropping, cultivation Neglected and Underutilized Species (NUS) and drought-tolerant crops, sustainable beekeeping, Integrated Food and Energy Systems (IFES), non-timber forest products (NTFPs), or producing certified charcoal from invasive bush species