ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we suppose that instead of East Africa facing the future challenges of climate change as it is today, that the region instead faces those challenges as it grows, educates, and urbanizes at its recent growth rates. The technologies that can increase farm production in response to climate change are, to a great extent, the same technologies that would increase farm productivity even if climate change were not an issue. Adoption of modern technologies, whether in farming or other sectors, is constrained by inadequacies in three categories: human capital, infrastructure, and institutions. When these categories are underdeveloped, farmers, like everyone else in a poor society, remain poor. On the positive side, education, infrastructure, and institutions tend to improve at the same time as income. We concentrate on these because there are policy levers that work directly on them and, in East Africa, there are already actions being taken to do so. To improve human capital, governments can invest in general education and expand agricultural extension services. To improve infrastructure, governments and other parties can invest in roads and other transportation infrastructure, such as pipelines, electrification, and information technology. To improve institutions, governments can expand property rights and financial markets.
