News Listing

Boosting intra-African trade and deepening regional integration offer an effective vehicle to speed up Africa’s economic transformation. Increasing the volumes of intra-African trade in agricultural products and the elimination of non-tariff barriers have the potential to boost industrialization and enhance competitiveness, at country and industry levels, through higher investments in connectivity ...

For the past 50 years, Daisy Namusoke has grown crops on her small plot of land in the Buikwe District of Central Uganda, mostly to feed her husband, five children, and two grandchildren. Like most smallholder farmers in Africa, she grows a mix of crops, relies on saved seeds and those purchased from local sources, and uses little by way of external inputs, such as synthetic fertilizers.

The world is letting down Africa’s smallholder farmers – and governments across the globe urgently need to more than double their spend on helping them adapt to the brutal daily realities of a climate that is already changing.

More than three quarters of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa prepare their fields using back-breaking, antiquated hand hoes. According to Josefa Sacko Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture at the African Union Commission (AUC) “eliminating hunger and malnutrition in Africa by 2025 will be no more than a mirage unless mechanisation is accorded utmost importance.”

When you move into gender people ask you what’s the business case, why does it matter? The truth is, for a long time gender equality has been viewed as just a human rights imperative, but latterly women’s contribution to the global economy has been under scrutiny.

Droughts have become more commonplace in South Africa in recent years. In the past two decades since 1990, 12 of those years were defined as drier years compared to only seven years in the previous 20 years.

African agriculture is fundamental to supporting rural livelihoods and bolstering economic growth, and can benefit from technology and advances in other development sectors. One solution to help Africa’s agriculture can come from an unlikely sector: sanitation.

Kenya relies on only 10% of her landmass for food while 89% of the country’s landmass, home to 36% of the country’s population, is arid and semi-arid land (ASAL) and over 3 million people are severely food-insecure.