The Central African forest ebony, Diospyros crassiflora Hiern, is a small tree native to the moist forests of the Congo Basin. Its appealing black heartwood was one of the first products to be exported from the Gulf of Guinea in the 17th century and is today one of the main sources of ebony globally. Like for other ebony species, its commercial exploitation raises serious questions about the long-term sustainability of its trade and the viability of its populations, but the dots are yet to be joined.

Micronutrient deficiencies (MNDs) remain widespread among people in sub-Saharan Africa1,2,3,4,5, where access to sufficient food from plant and animal sources that is rich in micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) is limited due to socioeconomic and geographical reasons4,5,6. Here we report the micronutrient composition (calcium, iron, selenium and zinc) of staple cereal grains for most of the cereal production areas in Ethiopia and Malawi. We show that there is geospatial variation in the composition of micronutrients that is nutritionally important at subnational scales.

The Government of India has committed to a national target to increase fish production to 22 million metric

Climate change is a growing threat to agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa, leading to rising poverty and malnutrition. Implementing climate smart agricultural practices at scale will require substantial investments from private and public actors. To understand the impacts of recent investments, challenges and perspectives, this study analyzes agricultural value chain investments in four African countries in the Sahel region: Senegal, Mali, Ethiopia, and Sudan.

Pro-poor interventions that use agrobiodiversity for development actions are widely considered relevant only at small scales. Agrobiodiversity interventions are often left out of national-level/large-scale development planning. Scaling-up modalities include adaptation, diffusion, replication, value addition, and temporal scaling up. We undertook a review of 119 interventions that use agrobiodiversity for both the crop and the livestock sector.

Smallholder production systems in low-income countries suffer the most from the impacts of climate change but receive the least benefit from climate adaptation programs. This is due to governance structures that make it difficult for governments and organizations to effectively reach marginalized communities. Technical, financial, and institutional support is provided in vertical siloes, limiting coordination between national government departments and hindering integrated climate interventions.

The Rethinking Food Markets and Value Chains for Inclusion and Sustainability Initiative aims to provide evidence on what types of bundled innovations, incentive structures, and policies are most effective at creating more equitable sharing of income and employment opportunities in growing food markets, while reducing the food sector’s environmental footprint. The Initiative is organized into four working groups (Work Packages-WP).

Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) works to facilitate and scale the development of tailored CIS and climate-smart agriculture making it accessible to smallholder farmers in six target countries. However, the costs

At present, our ability to comprehend the dynamics of food systems and the consequences of their rapid ‘transformations’ is limited. In this paper, we propose to address this gap by exploring the interactions between the sustainability of food systems and a set of key drivers at the global scale.

Diet quality is a critical determinant of human health and increasingly serves as a key indicator for food system sustainability. However, data on diets are limited, scattered, often project-dependent, and current data collection systems do not support high-frequency or consistent data flows. We piloted in Rwanda a data collection system, powered by the principles of citizen science, to acquire high frequency data on diets. The system was deployed through an unstructured supplementary service data platform, where respondents were invited to answer questions regarding their dietary intake.

The Digital Innovation in Agriculture workshop was centred on bolstering digital capabilities within Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) and nurturing collaborations with Disruptive Agricultural Technology start-ups. The event, held in Pune, convened FPOs, digital innovators, and experts to explore digital needs, promote digital innovation awareness, and foster FPOinnovator partnerships.

The purpose of this study was to assess women’s decision-making power in small-scale agriculture in six African countries in view of the feminization of agriculture and to discuss the meaning of decision-making in relation to women’s empowerment and sustainability. The data are drawn from a multisite and mixed-method agricultural research and development project in six sub-Saharan countries including two sites in each country. The five domains of empowerment outlined in the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index are used to structure the analysis.