Study after study has shown that a lack of affordable credit to purchase pumps is the number one reason why more farmers in sub-Saharan Africa don't adopt irrigation. Until farmers find a way around it, there is a danger that the emerging revolution in smallholder irrigation could stall.
In Today.AgriLife.org, the International Water Management Institute's partner Texas A&M receives funding for Feed the Future Innovation Laboratory for Small Scale Irrigation project.
Advancing the agenda of land restoration in Africa’s Sahel region, let alone globally, is no small feat. But it is essential to underpinning fragile livelihoods and achieving the SDG’s.
In recent years, the mitigation of climate change and the improvement of soil fertility by sequestering carbon in the soil has become a hot research topic. The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), supported by WLE, have had great success in developing projects to provide individual farmers and extension officers with soil information of relevance for their management decisions, meeting an increasing need for spatial data on soil properties at multiple scales.
Researchers frin the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ), and the University of Illinois find that a soil's prior management impacts its response to liming and phosphorus uptake.
WLE researchers based at ICRAF have authored a chapter in the recently launched GII 2018 report, highlighting the making of fuel briquettes from organic residue as an important innovation for Sub-Saharan Africa.
By Claudia Sadoff for the Telegraph. Malaria research is currently focused on new methods of genetic mosquito manipulation but the way large dams are currently built and designed creates massive mosquito breeding grounds, adding to the disease burden. Changing dam design is a significant and neglected area of opportunity.
The Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) aims to fill a major gap in soil spatial information in Africa. To this end new soil data were collected at over 9,000 locations from 60 sentinel sites in Africa and combined with collated and harmonized soil legacy data from over 18,000 locations in Africa.
Researchers from ICARDA and the Gondar Agricultural Research Center introduced the “Mirt” stove to households in Ethiopia to reduce the demand for firewood, improve soil fertility, and earn higher incomes for women. enhanced soil fertility – because of reforestation, reduced erosion and the availability of more manure; and higher incomes for women.
Ethiopia has experienced significant deforestation over the past century – driven by rapid population growth, the expansion of agricultural land, and the unsustainable demand for wood, often as a source of fuel for cooking and heating. The World Bank suggests that less than 3 percent of the country’s forests remain untouched.
