Creating Enabling Environments for Sustainable and Climate-Resilient Agriculture in Africa

Summary Highlights

27-30 May 2019 | Nairobi, Kenya On Thursday morning, GSW 2019 participants held discussions in a “lab” format to review key lessons and strategies gathered over the previous three days and test them against the realities of day-to-day policy formulation and implementation.

On land governance, the discussions focused on innovations at both the legal and institutional level as well as emerging community-based models for safeguarding women’s rights to land. While noting the complexity of natural resource-based conflict, the discussions also touched on entry points for partners to contribute to locally-led dialogue processes, for example to negotiate agreements between farmers, pastoralists and other land users.

Discussing lessons from workshops focusing on extension, speakers highlighted the role of new technologies and farmer-to-farmer models in developing advisory services that are more cost-effective and better targeted to specific local contexts. Noting the scale of this challenge in a continent where extension budgets have been falling over time, one speaker stressed that what is needed is nothing less than transforming and modernizing agriculture and associated policies, noting that African farmers account for a significant part of the estimated 1.5 billion smallholder farmers worldwide, “the biggest workforce on our planet.”

Find out more…