The holistic gardening project in Emuhaya, Western Kenya, is attracting local and international acclaim. Bio Gardening Innovations (BIOGI) is equipping smallholder farmers to break away from monocultures and create thriving, overflowing “food forests” on their farmland. Maize, the staple crop of Vihaga and Kakamega counties in Kenya, is harvested twice a...

Control of Foreign Fishing (CFF) explores options available to coastal states. It seeks to find the optimal combination of fee level, surveillance expenditure, and magnitude of legal penalties to minimize the risk of illegal fishing and maximize the benefits accruing to the coastal state. It provides an economic model that...

An FAO training has been a turning point in Rita’s shea business. Now she is an advocate and employer of other rural women, promoting sustainable livelihoods that can offset deforestation in her region. 

The commercialisation of traditional processed products from cassava, such as fufu, potentially offers new opportunities for income generation to rural households in Nigeria, Ghana and other parts of West Africa. Several options exist for the commercialisation of fufu, including the production of a shelf-stable product? This minimises the use of...

The preservation of fruit and vegetables by simple sun drying is practiced widely throughout arid and semi-arid areas, for example in Uganda. The use of low cost, solar drying technologies, can significantly improve product quality thereby providing practical opportunities for developing small-scale enterprise, particularly in rural areas, and creating employment...

This practice describes how Calliandra tree can be planted and grown in Uganda. First starting by seed collection and pre-treatment, then construction of seeds bed, seed sowing, and finally filling of polyethene pots with soil.

Value chains are structured in ways that are unfavourable to smallholder farmers who often struggle to access finance, inputs and markets. An IIED webinar discussed how smallholders in East Africa can use technology to overcome those challenges and negotiate with buyers and input and finance providers from a position of...

This report responds to heightened concerns over rising levels of farmer-herder conflict across a wide band of semi-arid Africa. We assess the quantitative evidence behind this general impression and review the explanations in the scientific literature, in the light of known issues with long-standing attitudes towards pastoralism and mobile populations....

A small scale farmer shows us how she manages to grow crops in a dry area. She harvests rain water which she uses for irrigating the crops. This has helped her to adapt to the effects of climate change. To learn more about our work on promoting organic agriculture, please...

The queen bee is the sole reproductive female in the honey bee colony. That’s why the queen is very important to the colony due to her main task of laying eggs. If the queen's ability to lay eggs is disturbed, a new queen is needed for the colony. This technology...

In recent years, along with the growing recognition of the rural gender gap in financial access as a key constraint to rural development, research has focused increasingly more towards analysing in depth the financial habits and patterns followed by women in rural areas, in order to produce observations and insights...

In Salah est une des oasis du sud-est de l’Algérie. Capitale de la région du Tidikelt, elle était historiquement le district le plus important du Touat. La production de dattes y était très diversifiée. En effet, la région était considérée comme l’un des marchés commerciaux les plus importants, notamment pour...

The honeybee suffers from diseases. In many parts of the world, research is underway for means of combating or preventing them. However the African bee industry is in its infant stage and not much research has been carried out on bee diseases in Africa. It is believed that some of...

Most fish farmers believe that a fish is a wild animal. They think that once put in pond water, it will survive naturally without adding any food supplement. This has resulted in pond fish taking a long period to reach a reasonable size. Most farmers add manure like cow dung and...

The practice of using bees to pollinate fruit crops is as new as the beekeeping industry in most parts of tropical Africa, although the practice has started in a few places in northern and southern Africa. This technology describes how farmers could utilize bees for pollination for their advantages via...

The preservation of fruit and vegetables by simple sun drying is practiced widely throughout arid and semi-arid areas, for example in Uganda. The use of low cost, solar-drying technologies can significantly improve product quality. This provides practical opportunities for developing small-scale enterprises, particularly in rural areas, and creating employment for...

Fish is important for good nutrition and fishery activities generate income and employment. However, industrial and intensive fishing and also wrong fishing methods deplete fish stocks. In Uganda, the major fishing activities are on Lake Victoria, one of the African great lakes and the second largest in the world. These...

Mukene, also called Dagaa or Omena, is found in Lakes Victoria, Kyoga and Nabugabo and in the Victoria Nile. It is among the three most important commercial fish species in Lakes Victoria and Kyoga. The mukene fish is fished by light attraction. Compared to gillnetting, light fishing is relatively new...

Increasing tree cover and managing trees better on farms in Ethiopia supports livelihoods and the environment but most tree-planting schemes promote only a few species. This research aimed to understand farmers’ tree planting priorities in Oromia, Ethiopia and address challenges involved in meeting them. Tree species and planting niches were...

The Karamoja sub-region (i.e. Karamoja) in Northeastern Uganda occupies 27,000 square miles of land and is currently inhabited by approximately 1.4 million diverse people – most speak the Nga’karimojong language (Feinstein International Center, 2007)[1]. It is environmentally, socially, politically and economically different from the rest of Uganda. Being largely dryland,...