Farmers' preference and willingness to pay for weather forecast services in Benin (West Africa)

The development of adaptive strategies to improve farmers' resilience to climate change and to strengthen rural population livelihoods is at the forefront of most debates on achieving sustainable development goals at the national, regional, and international levels. This study aims at analyzing Beninese farmers' preferences for weather forecasting services with the application of discrete choice experiments. Conducted in eight districts in four agro-ecological zones of Benin, data were collected from 716 randomly selected farmers. Based on financial and non-financial attributes, a mixed logit model was executed to elicit farmers' utilities among weather forecast service attributes and to perform the implicit value associated with each attribute. The findings showed that almost five-sixths of the choices refer to the proposed improved weather forecast. Farmers indicate more interest in long-run weather forecasts, high accuracy of the information, media other than radio for dissemination, and use of local language for information transmission. The results also highlight that farmers allocate the highest implicit value for various communication channel attributes, followed by the type of weather forecast information, quality of weather forecast services, and local language for communication. Projects supporting agricultural productivity improvement should consider the role of weather forecasts in improving farmers' livelihoods when defining climate change adaptation strategies. This consideration should include the essential characteristics that farmers desire for their large-scale participation in such an initiative. Agricultural development agencies need to define the best strategies to make accessible to farmers weather forecasting, an essential element of agricultural decision-making.