Studies indicate that gender, religion, class, and positions within households, and other cultural values also affect the uptake of information.As a result of the variety of social-economic and cultural factors which affect the uptake of forecast information, there is the need to focus on context-specific issues rather than wholesale generalizations of challenges.Hence, in Ghana, dissemination and farmers’ access to WIS has drastically improved.And the substantial body of knowledge on climate information science is developing in Ghana and elsewhere in sub-Sahara Africa.However, there is little evidence that WIS is applied in decision-making processes, including adaptive for smallholder farmers.Meanwhile, variability in climatic conditions affect farmers’ decision-making strategies, leading to low crop yield and increasing financial burdens on farmers in Ghana.We argue that the use of WIS for informed decision-making in farming requires an understanding of the usefulness and usability of WIS in terms of farmers’ definitions and perceptions.This knowledge gap is not well understood in the literature in Ghana and elsewhere in developing countries.Thus, providing WIS that is readily usable for decision-making in farming requires navigation and bridging any differences that might exist between what scientists/information providers perceive as useful and what is usable in practice.Therefore, this study examines the weather information services usability for farming decision-making with evidence from Ghana’s Ada East District.We organised the study into six sections.The study’s conceptual framework is presented in the next section, followed by a section on research methods.Subsequently, the study findings are presented in section 4,dutch buckets system followed by the discussion and conclusion in sections 5 and 6.
Usable information is defined in various ways to understand the relationship between information providers and users.We build on earlier definitions by attuning them to the farming context, where usable information is information that farmers are able to use as input for farming decisions.Although the terms useful and usable are often used interchangeably in the literature, they do not mean the same thing.Useful information is potentially relevant for decision-making, yet, because users may not know or may have unrealistic expectations about how it fits their decision-making, they may choose to ignore it.On the other hand, usable information is the knowledge that is readily applicable by users in the formulation of strategies under uncertain conditions like climate change and variability.Hence, although all forms of user-inspired knowledge are in principle useful, they are not always usable unless users and producers take specific steps to ensure that useful information is applied.On this note, it can be said that useful information relates to information providers’ outlook.In contrast, usable information pertains to users’ viewpoint about how applicable the information is for decision making in their context, considering factors such as availability of resources.It is precisely these different perceptions and understandings of useful and usable information between information providers and users that create the usability gap reflected in the low uptake of WIS.Dilling and Lemos distinguished the usability gap in climate information by indicating two broad areas: context and information production.For farming, context relates more to the farmer and issues arising from the farming community; for example, conservatism towards applying new information.Although this aspect of the usability gap is relevant, our study focuses on the information design and delivery aspect, which pertains to how information providers produce and deliver information to enable its usability.We build on Dilling and Lemos’ framework to develop analytical criteria for our study by attuning some of their factors with ours.
We expand on their framework, which focuses mainly on the formal scientific production of climate information services on a global scale.We do so by building five information design and delivery analytical criteria by adapting aspects of their framework and other new criteria derived from the literature to assess information design and delivery for farming.Local embeddedness refers to how information design and delivery connect with local farming conditions and context in a specific community.This criterion can relate to a situation where WIS is provided, including the knowledge of farmers, so that their unique characteristics, rules, farmers’ exposure to different sources of information, and information seeking and sharing behaviour are captured in the information design.Additionally, an information design with local embeddedness may include other relevant information design features such as agrometeorological indicators, agronomic tips, and so forth.The information should also be linked to farmers’ personal characteristics and social networks.Legitimacy denotes that information design and delivery conform to farmers’ interests, values, concerns, and perspectives, resulting in acceptability.Farmers may judge the legitimacy of the WIS based on who participated or not in its design and delivery.Here, the information design and delivery may consider several options, such as respect for farmers’ value and how the WIS connects to the contextual needs of farmers.Information providers may also attain legitimacy by maintaining mutual trust and respect.It also implies the alignment of the information to farmers’ local knowledge and values.Furthermore, the legitimacy of information can be affected if a forecast fails, is irregularly delivered, or is associated with long delivery chains and political biases.The temporal aspect of information design and delivery indicates when to expect specific weather conditions for farming, whereas the spatial resolution denotes the surface area for which information providers produce the forecast.The temporal criterion of information design and delivery may consider when the information delivery will be relevant to determine when to plough, sow seeds, or select crop varieties.Also, the presentation of timing as early onset, usual onset, and late onset in a seasonal forecast may be a relevant information design characteristic.
Information providers can tailor the information into high spatial resolution by integrating farmers’ local forecasts and analysing the implications of the projection with farmers.When the information design includes the delivery of high spatial resolution, some trade-off needs to be made between skill and scale criteria.We conducted the study in the Ada East District in the coastal savanna agroecological zone, where agriculture is the main economic activity.Agricultural activity in the district consists mainly of cultivating of vegetables, cassava, maize, watermelon, and other crops.Despite the relevance of farming for livelihood development and food supply to urban markets, the area experiences long dry spells, frequent dry spells, and low mean rainfall during the rainy seasons.The coastal savanna agroecological zone also experiences interannual variability interms of seasonal rainfall.In the area, the complex series of coastal/oceanic and atmospheric interactions including the role of the inter-tropical convergence zone contribute to uncertainty in weather conditions.These incidences have several implications, such as loss of planting materials, crop failure, and low yield.The Ada East District is selected for the study among other districts in the coastal savanna agroecological zones because the district is one of vegetable producing areas, including the Anloga-Keta area.Although the district shares the same climatic conditions with other districts, the availability of water to support the growth of crops is a challenge, compared to other districts such as the Anloga District and the Keta Municipality, which has groundwater available for farming throughout the year.In the district, the application of forecast information to support decision-making in farming is crucial.Despite growing research on the climate information sector in Ghana, most studies have focused on the Guinea, Sudan and the Sahal savanna agroecological regions.Hence, little knowledge exists on the provision of forecast information for farming in the coastal savanna agroecological area.
We argue that for the country to be food secure, there is the need to focus on regions especially, the Ada area, where water availability is a challenge despite its prominent role in the supply of food to rural and urban areas in Ghana.A qualitative research approach was applied in this study to establish rapport with research participants and use the findings to inform policy.Hence, in this study, we combined semi-structured interviews and focus group discussion methods to cross validate research findings and derived detailed information concerning the study’s objective.The qualitative research was conducted from June 2017–March 2018 in two phases, with results from phase one informing the organisation of the subsequent phase.The period stated above includes the performance of activities such as community entry, reconnaissance survey, informal conversations with farmers and stakeholders, and the actual data collection.The application of semi-structured interviews and FGDs as two phases of the research is described below.In the Ada East District, three farmers from each of the following communities were engaged in semi-structured interviews: Kasseh, Asigbekope, Bedeku, Ada Foah, Toje, Ocanseykope, Anyarkpor, Angorsekope, Dogo, Totimekope, Kajanya, Atortorkope and Tovie.At Detsekope, we interviewed one farmer, and at Kpodokope, we interviewed two farmers.This amounted to a total number of 42 semi-structured interviews in the Ada East District.With the assistance of agricultural extension agents and some community leaders, farmers were selected based on their availability, gender, dutch buckets use of WIS for farming, age, experience in farming, social status, and farming practices.We conducted interviews with either one male and two female household heads or two male and one female household head in each community.Participants in the interviews and the FGDs consented to partake in the study, and we assured them that their identity would be concealed in presenting research findings.The lead author conducted interviews in person, and respondents agreed that the researcher recorded the discussions.In the interviews, questions were posed on the types of WIS used, the extent of use, the ranking of the extent of use, explanations for a specific WIS’s choice over others, and other emerging issues were discussed.
The outcome of the semi-structured interviews informed the design of FGDs, to derive an in-depth understanding of farmers’ views concerning the types of WIS and the emerging factors which affected the usability of WIS for farming in the study district.Through the FGDs, we uncovered personal and communal attitudes, beliefs, and preferences of discussants concerning the types of WIS and their usability for farming.We designed the FGDs to elicit the interwoven factors that enhanced or obstructed WIS usability in the communities, when a participant indicated that an information provider delivered regular information, the group discussed and agreed on the definition.For example, guided by the lead author, discussants agreed that ‘regular’ could mean the daily or weekly provision of WIS.Overall, three FGDs were conducted in three communities: Toje, Anyarkpor, and Wassakuse.The three communities were representative of the three agricultural zones in the district, namely, the Kasseh, Big Ada, and the Ada Foah Zones.Through this cluster, we analyzed and derived general issues that affected the usability of WIS for farming in the district.The FGDs comprised eight to ten male and female farmers who were not part of the semi-structured interviews.At Toje, the discussants consisted of two older women, two younger women, three young men, and three older men.At Anyarkpor, there were nine participants in the FGD, comprising of three older women; one young woman; two young men; and three older men.At the same time, the FGD conducted in Wassakuse consisted of eight participants , for a total of 27 participants.There were no exclusive groupings of participants because, in the study district, women are allowed to freely express their views on issues in the presence of their male counterparts.Also, we sort to generate answers to the research in a context where participants could respond to multiple opinions.Thus, when a participant responded to a question, other discussants corrected or realigned some views together.Since we conducted the FGD purposively with different generational groups mixed together, we catered for the possible emergence of power and gender inequalities by calling each participant to express their opinion on a specific question.This approach helped to moderate the discussion and ensured that overactive participants did not dominate the entire discussion.We also called participants to vote on certain opinions, especially about the factors that enhance or obstruct the usability of weather information services and the ranking of the different information providers, including the district.Data analysis was carried out in three stages.The first stage involved the transcription of audio recordings of the semi-structured interviews and FGDs.We edited the transcripts by identifying the responses generated to specific questions, realigned sentence structures, and clarified the construction of some sentences.During this time, in addition to the field notes, we took notes on emerging issues.The next aspect of this stage involved grouping the transcript contents into specific identifiable themes.Second, we conducted inductive coding to identify the factors that affect WIS usability based on recurring words running through the transcripts.