East Africa blog posts

The average farmer has forty years' worth of planting seasons: forty chances to improve on his or her last harvest. If farmers cannot access the finance necessary to purchase irrigation systems, that number begins to shrink.

Debates on the best way to sustainably intensify agriculture have thus far focused on the constraints to adopting new farming technologies. Refocusing research on the actions of farmers could provide a clearer picture of the complex, context-dependent preconditions for sustainable intensification in specific places.

Not everything is what it seems – especially women’s access to resources in eastern Sudan. In conservative societies, it is easy to make vastly wrong assumptions about women’s positions based on observations of their daily routines or living situations.

The Raya Valley in Tigray, Ethiopia is a picture of fertile plains, diverse plant genetic resources and relatively untapped ground water potential. But although the valley is known for its endowment in natural resources, it is also known for its reoccurring droughts.

The government of Tigray, a region home to a growing population of over 4.5 million farmers, continues to promote food security through improved production and expanding land use for agriculture.

The Nairobi-Tana Water Fund comes at a time when water is more expensive than fuel for the majority in Nairobi; when more valuable topsoil is washed away in Noachian proportions; and when available science predicts radical shifts in climate. There is little scope left for debate and conjecture.

Climate science has a large interest in ‘average weather’. There is an obsession with predicting larger climate trends: regional long-term patterns of rainfall, temperature peaks and averages. How this pans out locally in time and space in less understood.

Situated in the far east of Sudan, the Gash Die is where the ‘wild’ Gash River comes to a stop in a desert territory – a so-called inland Delta. Since the 1970's, the fortunes of Gash Die have been on a steep decline.

When a savings and credit trainer had explained to a farmer that if he saved $1 per month for the last 30 years he would have more than $360, the farmer was impressed about the amount of savings he lost and raised a surprising question: where were you.

The Tana-Nairobi Water Fund is a public-private scheme uniting big business, utilities, conservation groups, government, researchers and farmers. It aims to increase farm productivity upstream, while improving water supply and cutting costs of hydropower and clean water for users downstream, and is designed to generate US$21.5 million in long-term benefits to Kenyan citizens, including farmers and businesses.

If tomorrow, all of East Africa’s wetlands disappeared, what costs would governments incur? While it is nearly impossible to place a quantitative value on wetlands, a new project is exploring methods of valuation of wetlands in the Nile Basin.

There are many gender mainstreaming workshops that take place each year. Few are successful at motivating behavior change. But a workshop in Gondar, Ethiopia was different. Some researchers came to argue that gender mainstreaming isn’t necessary. They left as supporters of the approach.