Many pilot-based initiatives have been developed to promote awareness and use of climate information services among vulnerable smallholder farmers in Africa through million-dollar investments. However, despite their experimental nature, these pilot projects have been successful in raising participating farmers’ awareness and use of climate information services and they can inform transferrable good practices. Through a systematic literature review approach, this review sought to understand ways in which these past pilot projects have contributed to climate risk management in the context of smallholder farming and the factors that led to their success. Results showed that climate information services main contribution to climate risk management has been through facilitating farm level decision making. Factors that led to success of the pilots include: use of downscaled information; building institutional partnerships to add value to climate information; involving farmers through the co-designing and co-developing process; face-to-face way of communication; embedding pre-seasonal workshops in the activities of local institutions for sustainability; using diversity of communication channels to enhance reach among others. These factors can be borrowed as good practices to inform future efforts focused on increasing adoption of climate information services among a wider population beyond pilot project reach.

Especially for smallholder farmers with limited land and financial resources, farming in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs), where season-to-season rainfall fluctuation dictates production, is a risky business. Through participatory approaches, this study compares deterministic and probabilistic interpretations of climate forecasts and their use by smallholder farmers through a crop-growing season. The study revealed that deterministic advisories are good for smallholder farmers only when formulated from forecasts with higher accuracy than the historical climatological distribution. Otherwise, they cause farm loss in terms of labor and inputs. On the other hand, probabilistic advisories help farmers spread the risk to cater to all the uncertainty and in so doing bring out a balance between confidence and caution. However, farmers must be supported with enough sensitization to comprehend forecast probability, translate it into probabilistic advisories and use that to plan and manage farm activities. The findings support the hypothesis providing packaged climate products in transparent probabilistic terms in place of deterministic form can overcome inherent credibility challenges. The study’s conclusion highlights important takeaways and new understandings of the advantage of using probabilistic advisories among resource-poor smallholder farmers.