Irrigation expansion is critical for agricultural and rural development, food and nutrition security, and climate change adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Lack of accessible energy for irrigation development due to limited off- and on-grid infrastructure and the resulting dependence on costly fuel-based irrigation have been key inhibiting factors for irrigation expansion in the region. Off-grid solar-powered irrigation pumps (SIPs) can overcome many of the energy access and other challenges in the region, but their uptake has been slow.

Antibiotics have revolutionised medicine in the last century and enabled the prevention of bacterial infections that were previously deemed untreatable. However, in parallel, bacteria have increasingly developed resistance to antibiotics through various mechanisms. When resistant bacteria find their way into terrestrial and aquatic environments, animal and human exposures increase, e.g., via polluted soil, food, and water, and health risks multiply.

Work package 4 maps rice areas using remote sensing, geographic information system (GIS), and crop modeling. This work builds on the Remote sensingbased Information and Insurance for Crops in Emerging economies (RIICE, http://www.riice.org/) co-developed by IRRI and implemented in South and Southeast Asian countries. RIICE technology is being introduced across Africa to enhance its rice monitoring system. A set of field protocols and forms was developed for seasonal field data collection.

AICCRA project provides pre-season and in-season advisories to farmers in the drylands through the Intelligent Systems Advisory Tool (iSAT). Leveraging historical climate trends and current/future weather conditions, iSAT develops weather advisories delivered via short message service (SMS) directly to farmers' mobile phones. This innovative approach empowers farmers with timely information, covering land preparation, crop selection, planting, weeding, and real-time pest and disease control and management updates.

Sustainable intensification practices suitable for smallholders in southern Africa will be needed to counteract the impact of future climate change and soil fertility decline in the region. Diversification of maize-based farming systems with grain legumes could play a key role. Here, we compared the performance of different maize-legume diversification strategies (single-row intercropping, strip cropping, and crop rotation) with sole cropped maize under conventional ploughing and Conservation Agriculture in four Zambian districts in the Eastern and Southern Provinces.

Work package 4 maps rice areas using remote sensing, geographic information system (GIS), and crop modeling. This work builds on the Remote sensing-based Information and Insurance for Crops in Emerging economies (RIICE, http://www.riice.org/) co-developed by IRRI and implemented in South and Southeast Asian countries. RIICE technology is being introduced across Africa to enhance its rice monitoring system. A set of field protocols and forms was developed for seasonal field data collection.

Picture-Based Insurance is a new, innovative way of delivering affordable, comprehensive, and easy-to-understand crop insurance. By relying on visible crop characteristics derived from farmers’ own smartphone pictures, it aims to minimize the costs of loss verification and detect damage at the plot level, making crop insurance more attractive and accessible to small farmers.

The new Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) is a streamlined tool for measuring women’s empowerment, intended for use in large-scale, multitopic surveys conducted by national statistical systems. WEMNS is designed to measure empowerment in households with all types of livelihoods, in both urban and rural areas, complementing the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which focuses on agricultural households.

This report describes the process carried out for the development of a component in the e-Agrology mobile application, which allows the farmer to accept informed consent, thus authorizing the sharing of data on their agricultural production.

On 7 February 2024 at the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis, CGIAR Centers – Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, ICARDA, IWMI, IFPRI, and supported by the CGIAR Accelerate for Impact Platform (A4IP) – in collaboration with the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology of Egypt (ASRT) and under the auspices of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research of Egypt (MOHESR) hosted the "Consultation Workshop: Deep Diving into the Agri-tech Innovation Ecosystem in Egypt".