| Sumario: | Rice is a vital staple food for most of Mali's population, especially supporting the food and nutritional security of poor rural farming households. However, like other crops, rice production in Mali faces challenges from recurrent extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, which impact yields and worsen food and nutritional insecurity among rural farmers. Of particular concern are the floods that affected several rice-growing villages in the Sikasso and Koulikoro regions during the 2025 rice farming season, destroying entire rice fields. As a result, farmers are likely to face increased food and nutritional insecurity along with livelihood losses in the 2025/2026 agricultural year. Vulnerable farmers respond and adapt differently to floods depending on whether they are using climate information services (CIS) promoted by AICCRA to guide their farming practices and whether they are using flood-tolerant rice varieties informed by digital climate advisories platforms. Farmers who benefited from CIS promoted by AICCRA Mali experienced less severe impacts from the flood, highlighting the importance of continuing to scale these CIS across rice production in Mali with the aim of sustained climate resilience. Moreover, between 2022 and 2025, over 498,220 farmers (16% of whom are women) are using tailored CIS promoted by AICCRA Mali for rice farming. The main goal of this workshop is to strengthen the capacity of various actors involved in rice value chains to use CIS via different digital platforms to inform their rice production decisions. The workshop also identified various barriers to adopting these CIS across different platforms. To strengthen the ongoing scaling of the AICCRA initiative, key lessons and insights from implementing the project from 2022 to 2025 will be identified, which are essential to promoting sustained dissemination of CIS in rice production in Mali.
This report summarizes the AICCRA Mali training workshop held on November 17, 2025, which focused on digital platforms for inclusive scaling of CIS. The day brought together 21 participants (35% women) from the Niger Office, the Institute for Rural Economy (IER), the National Meteorological Agency (Mali-Météo), Collective Actions for Sustainable Agriculture in Mali (ACAD-Mali), the Malian Association for Support and Advice to Community Initiatives (AMACIC), the Selingue Rural Development Office (ODRS), other local NGOs, and lead farmers' representatives from cooperatives to strengthen participants' capacity in using climate information tools for better agricultural planning. Participants came from three of the major rice-producing regions of Segou, Sikasso, and Koulikoro.
Led by Mali-Météo’s Meteorological Specialist, the session introduced participants to the Maproom platform, a web-based system that provides historical climate analyses, real-time monitoring, and seasonal forecasts to support climate-smart decision-making. Participants explored how Maproom turns complex climate data into practical insights and openly discussed its strengths, including open access, spatial accuracy, and national ownership, as well as challenges like irregular data updates, limited user connectivity, and the need for ongoing technical capacity.
Another presentation introduced AgDataHub, Mali’s emerging agricultural and climate data ecosystem, designed to combine weather, crop, soil, and satellite information into a single digital platform. Participants actively questioned how the platform can support advisory services, risk analysis, and agricultural planning, prompting discussions about data governance, sustainability, and opportunities for private-sector involvement. The day ended with an overview of AICCRA’s broader digital climate services activities, highlighting progress since 2022 and the potential to expand these tools nationally. Through lively interactions between presenters and participants, the workshop emphasized both the potential of digital platforms and the practical steps needed to ensure their long-term adoption, laying the foundation for resilient, data-driven rice production systems in Mali. Participants also recommended that AgDataHub be officially recognized and integrated into all AICCRA partner activities to ensure broader ownership and smoother scaling.
A presentation was also delivered on the various digital platforms promoted by AICCRA Mali, in partnership with Mali Mateo and Orange Mali. The presenter emphasized the importance of continuously expanding tailored CIS across different digital channels (radio, SMS, voice calls, WhatsApp), highlighting reported achievements in rice yield improvements and enhanced food and nutrition security for farmers. Farmers also shared their testimonials about how these innovations have helped them decide when to plant and harvest rice, and whether to choose drought- or flood-tolerant varieties.
Participant-presenter discussions on experiences from 2022 to 2025 demonstrate that the uptake of climate information through digital platforms improved significantly when trainings are delivered in local languages, tailored to user capacity, and accompanied by hands-on demonstrations, field days, plot demonstrations, and farmer field schools. Sustained engagement shows that co-design with farmers and extension agents, along with iterative feedback loops, are essential for refining tools, enhancing relevance, and building trust. The past four years also highlighted that climate data must be localized, simplified, and linked to actionable guidance to be truly useful for farmers and extension agents. Another key lesson is that the platforms gain traction when institutionally anchored within local organizational agricultural plans rather than positioned as temporary project innovations. Adoption accelerates when digital platforms are combined with human intermediaries - trained extension agents, community leaders, and facilitators, who translate information into practical advice for farmers. Finally, participants highlighted that internet connectivity, limited technical capacity, and insufficient resources for training, equipment, and follow-up support remain significant barriers that constrain adoption and widespread scaling.
|
|---|