Context *Abstract*: Surveys for more than 9,500 households were conducted in the growing seasons 2002/2003 or 2003/2004 in eleven African countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Niger and Senegal in western Africa; Egypt in northern Africa; Ethiopia and Kenya in eastern Africa; South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe in southern Africa. Households were chosen randomly in districts that are representative for key agro-climatic zones and farming systems. The data set specifies farming systems characteristics that can help inform about the importance of each system for a country’s agricultural production and its ability to cope with short- and long-term climate changes or extreme weather events. Further it informs about the location of smallholders and vulnerable systems and permits benchmarking agricultural systems characteristics. Content The data file contains survey data collected from different families and has 9597 rows that represent the households and 1753 columns with details about the households. The questionnaire was organized into seven sections and respondents were asked to relate the information provided to the previous 12 months’ farming season. There are too many columns to describe here, however they are described in detail in this paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201620?WT.ec_id=SDATA-201605][1] * Questionnaire.pdf: This file contains the questionnaire used, a description for each variable name and the question ID. * SurveyManual.pdf: This file gives further information on the household questionnaire, the research design and surveying. It was produced for the team leaders and interviewers in the World Bank/GEF project. * AdaptationCoding.pdf: This file describes codes for variables ‘ad711’ to ‘ad7625’ from section VII of the questionnaire on adaptation options. There is also some description in how the data was collected in Survey.pdf. Acknowledgements Waha, Katharina; Zipf, Birgit; Kurukulasuriya, Pradeep; Hassan, Rashid (2016): An agricultural survey for more than 9,500 African households. figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.1574094 https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201620?WT.ec_id=SDATA-201605 The original DTA file was converted to CSV Inspiration This dataset contains a huge amount of information related to farming households in Africa. Data like these are important for studying the impact of global warming on African agriculture and farming families. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201620?WT.ec_id=SDATA-201605