El estudio pretende comprender las normas sociales relacionadas con el género que afectan a las mujeres en la agricultura familiar y campesina en términos de sus capacidades productivas, acceso a servicios y mercados, y toma de decisiones.El estudio se llevó a cabo en el marco del Programa conjunto sobre enfoques de género transformadores para lograr la seguridad alimentaria y la nutrición, en colaboración con CARE Ecuador, utilizando la herramienta de exploración de normas sociales desarrollada por el Instituto de Salud Reproductiva de la Universidad de Georgetown en el marco del Proyecto

Maize is a critical staple cereal across Sub-Saharan Africa but attempts to improve its productivity in small-scale farming systems often prove disappointing. The 12 key technologies required to overcome poor yields are mostly known, but the manner that they are mobilized, packaged, and delivered requires re-evaluation. Combinations of better varieties and their necessary accompanying inputs must become more available and affordable for an African maize revolution to succeed, and land must be managed in ways that enhance, rather than diminish, land quality over time.

While climate services for small-scale farmers are gaining recognition for contributing to adaptation and resilience to climate variability and change, their provision in developing countries remains a critical challenge. Effective climate services consider why and how farmers of varied socioeconomic background make relevant decisions avoiding the traditional prescriptive forms of transfer that merely focus on delivering climate information.

Ethiopia's highland mixed crop-livestock farming system is one of the country's primary agricultural systems, where crop and livestock production is integrated. However, Ethiopia's mixed farming system, which is dominated by resource-poor smallholder farmers, is frequently confronted with feed shortages and land degradation in the form of soil erosion and nutrient depletion, resulting in low agricultural production. Assuring sustainable agricultural output (both from crop and livestock sub-sector) in the mixed crop-livestock system is becoming a key challenge.

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.

Key messages
• Population growth, changing diets, and a rapidly growing feed sector are contributing to a sharp increase in global maize demand which is expected to double by 2050 relative to 2010.
• Average global maize yield is projected to decrease by 11% under a global warming scenario of 2.0 °C (2060-2084) relative to the 1986–2005 period (in the absence of technological change, adaptation, or market adjustments).

Most tea in Laos is produced by smallholder farmers, who benefit from highly suitable growing conditions and strong demand for sought-after varieties from the vast Chinese market. However, the sector faces many challenges to achieve its full potential. A key barrier in the northern provinces has been the tendency towards monopsony trade concessions, in which the production of a whole district can be under exclusive control of one buyer.

The Sustainable Intensification of Mixed Farming Systems (SIMFS) is a CGIAR initiative. This initiative ‘aims to provide equitable, transformative pathways for improved livelihoods of actors in mixed farming systems through sustainable intensification within target agroecological and socioeconomic settings. To achieve this, different methodologies, innovations, and practices have been implemented to understand and improve the agroecological/productive conditions to assess a benefit on nutrition, food security and welfare.

Agroecology is a transdisciplinary, participatory, and action-oriented approach for co-designing options that enhance food system resilience, equity, and sustainability. Working in eight countries of the Global South, the CGIAR Initiative on Agroecology seeks effective ways to put this approach into practice.

Across South Asia, millions of small-scale farmers are confronted with a range of urgent challenges. These include poverty, malnutrition, environmental deterioration, and the growing impacts of climate change and unpredictability (Ericksen et al., 2011). Despite these pressing concerns, the region’s farming systems still have potential to sustainably its productivity and profitability (Islam et al., 2019; Gathala et al., 2021).

The 2023 year-end workshop with the national partners from the CGIAR Initiative SIMFS was held on 2 December in Hotel Sarina, Dhaka, Bangladesh. The meeting was presided over by Dr. Humnath Bhandari, IRRI Representative for Bangladesh. Scientists from different NARSE organizations (BARI, BRRI, BLRI) were present in this workshop.