Key messages:
• Seven agriculture and agrifood value chain innovations are found to improve employment and income opportunities in the agrifood value chains.
• Such income and employment require adequate enabling policies, including infrastructure investments, support to wholesale market development, social protection, labor market regulation, and supporting collective action organizations.
• Eleven knowledge gaps need to be addressed to better inform agrifood system policy and investment decision-making.

We analyze rural households’ purchases of food (cereals and non-cereals) in Sub-Saharan Africa using nationally representative data with 65,000 observations covering 7 countries over a decade. We distinguish between three strata of countries: lower stratum in income and urbanization, middle stratum, and upper stratum. The paper breaks ground by the breadth and time length of the sample. We find that purchases form the majority of rural food consumption whether in favorable or unfavorable agroecological zones and over country and income strata and for most food products.

Much has been made of the potential for aquaculture to improve rural livelihoods and food and nutrition security in Africa, though little evidence exists to back such claims. This study, conducted in northern Zambia, assessed the benefits of adopting aquaculture by comparing a sample of households with (n = 177) and without fishponds (n = 174).

A wealth of publicly available satellite data and open-source models allowed researchers to measure carbon stocks in a watershed in India, despite a paucity of on-the-ground data. They found that despite rapid urbanization over the last 20 years, carbon stocks remained relatively stable – possibly due to successful reforestation activities. The research points to how nature-positive solutions can be designed and measured at scale. The research also lays the foundation for global studies to promote a deeper understanding of ecosystem services and sustainable land management.

Land degradation is a severe environmental problem in the northern and northwestern Ethiopian highlands. As a response to increasing land degradation, rehabilitation of degraded grazing lands through exclosures (exclusion of farmers and domestic animals) has been undertaken. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of 11 and 8-year exclosures in improving degraded landscapes in the Karita-Wuha and Dengora watersheds. It was assumed that the conditions on communal grazing lands at the time of the investigation corresponded to those at the establishment of exclosures.

Overcoming future sustainable development challenges will require significant transformations in food, land, and water systems. However, the challenges faced by countries are varied and complex. Produced by IWMI, the Policy Pathways podcast will examine the policy coherence of food, land, and water systems in six of the CGIAR’s National Policies and Strategies Initiative countries.

Agriculture consumes the largest share of freshwater globally; therefore, distinguishing between rainfed and irrigated croplands is essential for agricultural water management and food security. In this study, a framework incorporating the Budyko model was used to differentiate between rainfed and irrigated cropland areas in Africa for eight remote sensing landcover products and a high-confidence cropland map (HCCM). The HCCM was generated for calibration and validation of the crop partitioning framework as an alternative to individual cropland masks which exhibit high disagreement.

Confronting sustainable development challenges requires system transformation in Food, Land, and Water! Policy Pathways invites policymakers and sustainable development stakeholders to share their expertise on the policy solutions that can advance system transformation across the globe. CGIAR Research Initiative on National Policies and Strategies has produced a series of policy coherence reports focused on India, Colombia, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and Laos.

Egypt’s quota of Nile River water has been constant since the 1950s, despite the continual agricultural land expansion. To facilitate land reclamation, Egypt has reallocated Nile water from downstream users, mostly smallholders in the ‘old lands’ of the Delta. As water demands have grown, more attention has gone to the reuse of waste/drainage water as a reliable source for irrigated agriculture in the “old lands”.

A bibliometric study on mapping the rice cropping systems in VMD is crucial for understanding the trend of EO-based rice mapping and how remote sensing technologies are essential to address the food security issue in the region. This article presents an overview of Earth observation (EO)-based rice mapping strategies since 1979, prioritizing the scope of data, approaches, and techniques derived from 3700 research articles worldwide and contrasting them with the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD).

Soil and water conservation have been traditionally part of farming practices for thousands of years. Despite massive efforts to implement modern soil and water conservation practices (SWCPs) in the Ethiopian Highlands, soil erosion increased after the 1970s when social and political events led to a remarkable change in land use. This review aims to critically analyze the impact of conservation practices on soil loss and crop yield and highlight research and modeling gaps.