**1. Introduction**

Due to the prevailing climate variability brought about by a changing climate global phenomena, the devastating impact on various sectors have been felt at regional and local levels more so, the developing countries. The changing climate is having a growing impact on the African continent, hitting the most vulnerable hardest, and contributing to food insecurity, population displacement and stress on water resources. Further, the latest decadal predictions, covering the five-year period from 2020 to 2024, shows continued warming and decreasing rainfall especially over North and Southern Africa, and increased rainfall over the Sahel [1]. Extensive areas of Africa will exceed 2 °C of warming above pre-industrial levels by the last two decades of this century under medium scenarios as reported in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report [2]. Some countries in the sub Saharan Africa have recently witnessed increased flood disasters, invasion of desert locusts that endanger food security and livelihoods and now face the looming danger of drought due to the likelihood of La Niña event [3].

The Horn of Africa region experienced a combination of very dry conditions, floods and landslides associated with heavy rainfall between 2018 and 2019 period while the Southern Africa region faced drought phenomena. A report by WMO explains that extensive flooding occurred over large parts of Africa in 2020 as rainfall was mainly above average in most of the Greater Horn of Africa region during the March–May season. This followed a similarly wet season in October– December 2019. Sudan and Kenya thus were affected more with 285 deaths reported in Kenya and 155 deaths and over 800,000 people affected in Sudan in addition to disease impacts associated with flooding. Heavy rains in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa resulted in the largest desert locust outbreak in 25 years across the Horn of Africa [4, 5]. In Ethiopia alone, 200000 hectares of cropland were damaged and over 356000 tons of cereals were lost, leaving almost one million people food insecure [6]. In Somalia, floods were associated with the displacement of over one million people in 2020, mostly inside the country, while drought-related impacts induced a further 80,000 displacements [7].

Based on Remote Sensing data and other observations, Kenya's Lakes that include Naivasha, Elementaita, Nakuru, Bogoria, Baringo, Turkana, Logipi have been rising since 2018. Most of the lakes have over flown displacing thousands of people from their homes, leaving behind submerged schools, health facilities and social amenities and rendering some of the public infrastructure like roads impassable [8]. The agricultural sector in Eastern and some Southern Africa region remain dominantly a rainfall dependent system and majority of farmers work on a small-scale or subsistence level and have few financial resources, limited access to infrastructure, and disparate need for access to agronomic data and information [9]. For the farmers, any abnormal variation in rainfall onset and cessation dates in addition to extreme temperatures result in serious crop loss or damage. With the prevailing changes in weather patterns due to changing climate, African traditional knowledge systems in weather prediction for agriculture otherwise reliable for centuries could or have been rendered ineffective to some extent. Agriculture, being the backbone of

#### *Integrating Local Farmers Knowledge Systems in Rainfall Prediction and Available Weather… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96504*

Africa's economy and accounting for the majority of livelihoods across the continent is both an exposure and vulnerability "hot spot" for climate variability and change impacts [10]. IPCC projections have suggested that warming scenarios risk having devastating effects on crop production and food security. Farmers therefore have suffered and will continue to suffer the most in their farming enterprise due to crop losses related to heat stress and pest damage, crop diseases and food system destabilization due to floods brought about by variations in weather and climatic conditions [10]. To mitigate this phenomena, most farmers have continued to rely on their indigenous knowledge systems in weather prediction in addition to integrating available weather forecasts to create a synergy to enable them navigate such uncertainties related to climate variability. This has created a great need for climate and weather information to be delivered to those farmers engaged in farming activities at the farm level in rainfall dependent farming systems. The information thus needs to be context specific, timely and delivery through the most reliable and accessible modes.

The objective in this chapter is to determine how farmer's indigenous knowledge systems in rainfall prediction influence farm level planning and decisions in Kenya and other countries. Perspectives from some Eastern and Southern Africa region on utilization of indigenous knowledge system in rainfall prediction together with available weather forecasts to mitigate climate variability in the agricultural enterprise is captured for evidence based practice.
