The land and climate in northern Mozambique make it an agricultural goldmine and farmers should be making a lot of money selling their surplus produce. So why are most of them just scraping by? The key is to start thinking of farming as a business.

Formal organic agriculture (OA) in Kenya dates back to the early 1980s when the first pioneer organic training institutions were established. Major pioneers being driven by the belief that OA system is the best in solving the rural and smallholder problems of food insecurity & soil degradation. The organic sub-sector...

Connu sous le nom de Mata Masu Dubara au Niger, le modèle AVEC (association villageoise d’épargne et de crédit) a été repris et développé au Bénin. Les associations villageoises ont pour mission de servir les plus pauvres dont les femmes rurales, ceux dont les revenus sont irréguliers et moins fiables...

The FAO Regional Initiative, “Renewed Partnership to End Hunger in Africa by 2025”, seeks to assist countries in strengthening their efforts and capacity to deliver programmes that contribute to eradicating hunger. It aims to add value to ongoing work at country level by sharpening the programmatic focus on food security...

For decades, policymakers and development practitioners have debated benefits and threats of property rights formalization and private versus customary tenure systems. This paper provides insights into the challenges in understanding and empirically analyzing the relationship between tenure systems and agricultural investment, and formulates policy advice that can support land tenure...

FAO is supporting family farmers, who have an often-undervalued role to play in ensuring global food security. The Swaziland Agricultural Development Project, led by the government with assistance from the European Union and FAO, is helping over 20,000 smallholder farmers produce more, higher-quality food and connect with new markets.

Malawi faces significant challenges in meeting its future food security needs because there is little scope for increasing production by simply expanding the area under cultivation. One potential alternative for sustainably intensifying agricultural production is by means of conservation agriculture (CA), which improves soil quality through a suite of farming...

African countries have the youngest population in the world and the largest share of the world’s available arable land. Indeed, as the Youth Division of the Africa Union Commission puts it, about 65% of the total population of Africa is below the age of 35 years and 10 million youth...

Nutrition education experts in Malawi have initiated a review of the country’s nutrition education curriculum to be incorporated in the curricula of Teacher Training Colleges. The review was made during a two-day national consultation workshop held in Kasungu from 16-17 November 2015 under the “Strengthening School Food & Nutrition Programs...

One of the key requirements towards achieving agriculture-led development in Africa as stated in the CAADP and Malabo Declaration, is to invest in transforming Africa’s Agricultural Education System. This integrated policy framework was developed to address the need of transforming and embracing various forms of agricultural education and training methods....

A collaborative project between farmers in northwest Tanzania’s Karagwe District, the development organization Community Habitat Environmental Management and Matunda Mema, an organic produce exporter, demonstrates that small-scale East African farmers can benefit from the growing demand for organic products.

Regional Office for Africa quarterly newsletter covering the months of October to December, 2015

Small-scale, resource-poor farmers organize fair trade grower cooperatives to market certified organic cocoa exports from post-war Sierra Leone.

In drought-ridden Samburu county, support programmes are helping women to provide for their families and build communities’ resilience to climate change

This paper analyzes how a set of widely promoted agricultural practices, including reduced tillage, crop rotations, legume intercropping as well as the use of modern inputs, affect crop yields and their resilience (i.e. probability of disastrously low yields) in Zambia using panel data from the Rural Incomes and Livelihoods Surveys...

African governments and international development groups see boosting productivity on smallholder farms as key to reducing rural poverty and safeguarding the food security of farming and non-farming households. Prompting smallholder farmers to use more fertilizer has been a key tactic. Closing the productivity gap between male and female farmers has...

Expansion of irrigation is a recurrent objective of the agricultural development plans formulated by successive governments in Malawi. More intensive and continual use of Malawi’s water and agricultural land resources is expected to increase and stabilize production of food and export crops, thereby increasing farm incomes, spurring growth in the...

À l’instar des milliers de paysans pauvres qui vivent sur le versant est du mont Kenya, Christine était tributaire de la pluie pour irriguer ses cultures. Aujourd’hui, elle dispose de l’eau courante. Comment ce changement a-t-il été possible?

Governments promote the use of cooperatives to enhance development of smallholder farmers. However, challenges are inevitable and this study investigated factors responsible for the collapse of agricultural cooperatives in Manicaland province of Zimbabwe, and developed propositions for use on a larger scale. Five cooperatives drawn from Mutasa and Chimanimani districts...

Après dix années de guerre civile, les agricultrices ivoiriennes luttent contre la pauvreté et préservent la paix en cultivant des semences de riz de haute qualité, ce qui leur permet non seulement de doubler leurs rendements et leurs profits mais aussi de gagner en indépendance.