Climate Change is a big challenge to development interventions at the moment yet it becomes a major global agenda and conferences after conference are being organized to find a lasting solution. Communities are finding it hard to predict weather patterns; the rural community that is dependant on subsistence farming continues experiencing loss and decrease in production as a result of the changing weather patterns. There seems to be no hope among the small holder farmers as crops they used to grow no longer does well and traditional varieties of crops are almost facing extinction.

At the moment expectations are high as all the world governments will be heading to Copenhagen to sign Climate Change mitigation Agreement.  Different researchers are working day and night to develop environmentally friendlier technologies to help cushion communities from ravaging effects of climate change. All these are well intentioned measures aimed at solving the problem once and for all. The efforts are aimed at making the small scale farmers not to continue suffering the negative effects and make the governments responsible.
However, a major challenge is lack of or least involvement of farmers in these processes. It is quite disheartening to observe that more and more resources are continuously invested to develop technologies that sometimes do not suit the smallholder farmer’s environment. And everybody seems to be doing something with the sole aim of helping the smal scale farmers. The rush is quite positive and should be encouraged as it is the small scale farmers who are more susceptible to the effects of climate change. Secondly, it is the small scale farmers who continuously feed the globe.

Drastic measures should be taken to improve farmers involvement at all levels of technology development. Farmers are experts and spend much time on their farms observing different dimensions of technology development.
To creatively involve farmers in research on Climate Change Adaptations measures, UCRC uses ICT to tap the farmers’ indigenous knowledge on climate change. We have identified a group of farmers that have been trained on use of digital cameras, video camera, sound recorders and writing skills. This group of farmers therefore uses the same equipments borrowed from UCRC to document their own innovations in their own language. UCRC staff assists the farmers in editing and cleaning the information received. The documented information is shared by the farmers in their meeting forums and UCRC is exploring on how to make this information available to other farmers through various media outlet. The project has been running for the last six months and an inventory of innovations has been developed through the aid of farmers. The technologies documented are quite promising and more focus needs to be given to such innovations as they trusted and are continuously practiced by farmers.

For the period of six months, UCRC together with farmers have documented so much information on indigenous farming systems. We are now inviting partners and willing researchers to work with us in helping validate some of this information. Farmers have devised rich ways of coping with much rainfall and dry weather. It is though unfortunate that that this rich knowledge is only confined among the few elderly farmers in the community. The information seems not to trickle down to the young farmers and the traditional sharing platforms are no longer operational.

Participatory Ecological Land and Agriculture Management organization (PELUM) Uganda, UCRC and other NGOs, recently organized a four days workshop in Uganda. The workshop objective was to develop a training manual that would be used by different partners to promote Farmer Led Documentation activities (FLD). UCRC were presented in this training by two of her staff; Rachel Adipo and Gabriel Ofuwa. The first draft of the training tool kit is out and is currently undergoing review. It is our hope that once this manual is ready, it will ease the process of promoting

FLD among farmers and encourage knowledge sharing. Farmers are experts and should take central role in technology development.
training hall