Africa

This briefing by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) highlights how indigenous knowledge and practices play a crucial role in maintaining and enhancing genetic diversity, which reduces agricultural risk and increases resilience to climate change. Evidence from the SIFOR project (Smallholder Innovation for Resilience) in Kenya, India, China and Peru shows how these practices can significantly enhance productivity, incomes and resilience in harsh environments, contributing to the targets set out in Sustainable Development Goal 2. »

This report by Fairfood and CNV Internationaal identifies a host of interventions that will improve the situation of farmers in the vanilla value chain in Madagascar. The report examines the riches that vanilla production delivers, and the abject poverty many vanilla farmers experience. Vanilla is one of the most expensive and widely exported spices in the world, yet the large majority of the 80,000 smallholder vanilla farmers do not see this reflected in their income and are often even unable to provide food for themselves and their families. »

This paper by IIED presents the reflections of more than 160 Chinese agronomists who have spent time implementing Chinese agricultural technologies in Africa. Chinese actors are increasingly engaging in African agriculture. This research, conducted by the newly constituted research division of the Foreign Economic Cooperation Centre (FECC) of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, can be seen as a first step to gain insight into their experiences, in order to allow a more productive dialogue with a range of stakeholders in China-Africa agriculture engagement. »

This paper aims to improve our understanding of the impact of rural-urban transition from a micro-level perspective, using evidence from Tanzania. This study will be the first to assess the impact of urbanization on food consumption through comparing individuals’ food consumption patterns before and after they have migrated from rural to urban areas. »

This article in the Ghana Journal of Science, Technology and Development, highlights the role of innovation platforms for resilience thinking. In this paper, the concept of resilience is approached from the perspective of socio-ecological systems dynamics. In particular, the study examined the contribution of farmers to research towards enhanced resilience of traditional African vegetable production systems in northern Ghana. An Innovation Platform was set up as a ‘knowledge space’ that provided an enabling environment for the interaction between farmers’ indigenous and researchers’ scientific knowledge in agricultural research. »

This book by the World Bank presents emerging findings on the importance of moving beyond single-sector interventions to embrace integrated landscape approaches in Sub-Saharan Africa. This includes landscape management that takes into account the health of the ecosystems that support human livelihoods and contribute to the resilience of rural communities. Integrated landscape management is particularly important for these drylands because people depend on production systems that are frequently disrupted by exogenous shocks such as drought. »