"I got a personal reminder of how resourceful and resilient African smallholder farmers like Mary are."
So writes Bill Gates in a blog post from a trip he took to Kenya last month.
He was there to see how Mary Mathuli, a farmer in rural Kenya, was coping with climate change and its effects, and he found her to be "resilient, resourceful, and embracing new technologies to adapt to some of the toughest conditions for growing crops and raising livestock."
That includes planting drought-tolerant seeds, feeding and weighing chickens, and using a mobile phone to monitor local crop prices.
"I planted drought-tolerant seeds, fed and weighed chickens, and used a mobile phone to monitor weather forecasts and local crop prices," Gates writes.
"This experience taught me a couple important lessons," he continues.
"First, my farming skillslike holding a chicken and swinging a hoeneed some work.
Second, and more importantly, I got a personal reminder of how resourceful and resilient African smallholder farmers like Mary are."
Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 4% of the world's carbon emissions, but it's bearing the brunt of climate change impacts, and losses on many African farms are more than double what's seen globally.
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Ganesh Natarajan is the Founder and Chairman of 5FWorld, a new platform for funding and developing start-ups, social enterprises and the skills eco-system in India. In the past two decades, he has built two of India’s high-growth software services companies – Aptech and Zensar – almost from scratch to global success.