ASSESING ACCESSIBILITY AND USABILITY OF THE METEOROLOGICAL INFORMATION BY SMALLHOLDER FARMERS IN M’MINA AND GOMANI VILLAGES

Climate change issues has been increasing in the past decade, the most recent weather extreme in Malawi is the cyclone idai in 2019. Therefore, Meteorological information is critical in making agriculture decisions since it is a climate sensitive sector. Malawi is a country that heavily relay on agriculture for their social-economic development. Most of the meteorological information accessed by the local based farmers in Malawi is through radio. Due to this, a descriptive research was conducted in M’mina and Gomani villages in Thyolo district, to find out the accessibility and usability of meteorological information by the local based farmers. A group of 40 local based farmers was sampled to represent the whole population of all farmers. Accessibility of the meteorological information of the local based farmers was 40% and usability of the meteorological information was at 62.5% of the local based farmers who had access to meteorological information. Utility of the meteorological information was mainly affected by the timing of the weather forecast and the quality of the weather forecast in order to be applicable to the making farming decisions. Therefore, an active collaboration between the DCCMS, agriculturists, and farmers is needed in order to increase usability of the meteorological information by the farmers