Endline adoption of climate-smart agriculture through participatory training and community savings groups in rural Ghana

Abstract Food security and climate resilience sit in uncomfortable tension across sub-Saharan Africa, and climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has been promoted as the bridge between them. Whether participatory action research (PAR) interventions can close the knowledge-to-practice gap in a lasting way remains inadequately answered in West African smallholder contexts. This paper presents findings from the end-of-project evaluation of the ReDIAL project, a four-year (2020–2024) EU-funded initiative across five agroecologically diverse districts in Ghana. The evaluation used a convergent parallel mixed-methods design: 400 household surveys, 50 focus group discussions, and 60 key informant interviews. By endline, 96% of project beneficiaries had received CSA training and roughly nine in ten were actively applying at least one CSA practice on their farms. Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) proved central—not as peripheral financial add-ons, but as the institutional mechanism that converted knowledge into sustained practice by providing farmers the credit needed to act on what they had learned. Average monthly household income rose from GHS 413 (USD 38) at baseline to GHS 707.5 (USD 64) at endline, surpassing the national average for comparable occupations by 15.6%, with women’s incomes more than doubling. Persistent challenges remain: agricultural credit is still too expensive for most smallholders, gender income gaps have narrowed but not closed, and no formal exit strategy was produced. Implications for the design, resourcing, and handover of PAR-driven CSA programmes are discussed.