RESEARCH ARTICLE Building adaptive capacity: Reducing the climate vulnerability of smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe Tinashe Mitchell Mashizha Lower Guruve Development Association, Guruve, Zimbabwe Correspondence Tinashe Mitchell Mashizha, Lower Guruve Development Association, P. O. Box 165, Guruve, Zimbabwe. Email: tmashizha@gmail.com Abstract Climate change is affecting agricultural production, particularly in Africa, where agriculture forms the backbone of rural economies. Smallholder farmers in rural areas are vulnerable to the effects of climate change due to their marginalised location, low levels of technology, and reliance on rain‐fed agriculture. This conceptual paper finds that adaptation is cross cutting in nature and complex. Hence, it requires an approach that incorporates both policy and investment issues into its planning. This research not only contributes to literature on adaptation strategies but will also provide relevant insight for capacity building on smallholder farmers to avert the ongoing and future climate crisis. Furthermore, it contributes to hitherto limited work on understanding how adaptive capacity is shaped and be sustainable in Zimbabwe. This paper recommends that the government and private sector should disseminate technology that helps farmers adapt to climate change and access to irrigation technology must be a priority. KEYWORDS adaptive capacity, climate vulnerability, food security, investment, technology transfer 1 | INTRODUCTION The public discourse of climate change although shrouded by uncertainties but its multiple facets impacts which are real and unequivocal has now been widely recognised and accepted by scientific communities (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2007; Mishra et al., 2014). In the past 30 years, climate change has contributed to global agricultural decline of 1–5% per decade (Abdul‐Razak & Kruse, 2017; Porter et al., 2014). Its effect are also predicated to manifest in severe consequences for the global agricultural sector (Mthembu & Zwane, 2017; Thornton, 2012) and the economies of countries in sub‐Saharan Africa that are largely driven by the agricultural sector. Countries and regions that fail to adapt to climate change will contribute to global insecu- rity through the spread of disease, conflict over resources, and a degradation of the economic system (El‐Ashry, 2009). Given the far ranging adverse impacts of climate change, adaptation must be an integral component of an effective strategy to address climate change, along with mitigation. Recent literature has illustrated that communities in sub‐Saharan Africa significantly depend on subsistence rain‐fed agricultural produc- tion for food security (Makate, Makate, Mango, & Siziba, 2018; Ngongondo et al., 2016). The heavy reliance on rain‐fed agriculture renders many sub‐Saharan countries vulnerable to negative conse- quences of climate change and variability, such as increased occur- rence of extreme events such as droughts. As illustrated by Mashizha (forthcoming), Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world, particularly because of widespread poverty and its lim- ited coping capacity. Zimbabwe is particularly vulnerable due to its heavy dependence on rain‐fed agriculture and climate‐sensitive resources (Chagutah, 2010; Mashizha, Monga, & Dzvimbo, 2017). Studies conducted in Zimbabwe shows that negative impacts of cli- mate change on crop yields and food production have been far more common than positive impacts (Dzvimbo, Mashizha, Monga, & Ncube, 2017; Mugambiwa & Tirivangasi, 2017). Smallholder farmers in rural areas are severely influenced by cli- mate change as they have the low adaptive capacity to climatic change (Menikea & Keeragala, 2016). Although there is deliberate efforts from Received: 9 September 2018 Revised: 15 December 2018 Accepted: 16 December 2018 DOI: 10.1002/bsd2.50 Bus Strat Dev. 2019;1–7. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/bsd2 1