Water scarcity is already set to be one of the main issues of the 21st century, because of competing needs between civil, industrial, and agricultural use. Agriculture is currently the largest user of water, but its share is bound to decrease as societies develop and clearly it needs to become more water efficient. Improving water use efficiency (WUE) at the plant level is important but translating this at the farm/landscape level presents considerable challenges.

At the end of the module participants will be able to: to identify and demonstrate the Challenges of Climate Change to Soils and Fertility Management; to explain and demonstrate the concepts of Landscape Approach for Achieving Climate Smart Agriculture through Nutrient Management; to demonstrate and apply the Concepts and Principles of Soil Health and Soil Fertility Management for Crop Production, and to demonstrate the Approaches in Nutrient and Water Management for Sustainable Crop Production.

Climate impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa are severe and will increase. Agriculture is a cornerstone of the economies of most countries and yet is dominated by climate-vulnerable rainfed systems. Meeting the food demands of the growing African population will require significant adjustments in food production systems and unfortunately, current adaptation efforts across the continent are insufficient to meet the climate challenge.

Integrated landscape approaches (ILA) aim to reconcile multiple, often competing, interests across agriculture, nature conservation, and other land uses. Recognized ILA design principles provide guidance for implementation, yet application remains challenging, and a strong performance evidence-base is yet to be formed. Through a critical literature review and focus group discussions with practitioners, we identified considerable diversity of ILA in actors, temporal, and spatial scales, inter alia.

This manual was developed as a training guide to empower and equip members of the farmers’ cooperative with the essential knowledge, skills, and best practices required to adopt and implement CSA technologies and Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs).

While many have extolled the potential impacts of digital advisory services for smallholder agriculture, the evidence for sustained uptake of such tools remains limited. This paper utilizes a survey of tool developers and researchers, as well as a systematic meta-analysis of prior studies, to assess the extent and challenges of scaling decision support tools for site-specific soil nutrient management (SSNM-DST) across smallholder farming systems, where “scaling” is defined as a significant increase in tool usage beyond pilot levels.

Supporting women’s groups and their collective action is considered as one of the key ways to increase their climate resilience. Women’s groups are a means to reach women with capacity building activities, and also serve as a platform where they exercise collective and individual agency to take adaptive decisions. Strengthening the capacity of women’s groups on climate information services (CIS) and climate smart agriculture (CSA) innovations is a key pillar for gender-responsive climate smart agriculture intervention.

The project intervention communities of The Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) in Ghana are vulnerable to climate variability and change, which continues to pose a threat to food crop production. Increasing the resilience of the communities includes building their capacity on climate smart agriculture practices (CSA), climate information services (CIS) and One-health (OH) innovations. A Training of Trainers workshop was organized and Thirty-six Master trainers (mainly extension officers) received training on CSA, CIS, and OH innovations.

Using radio for extension service has the potential to reach many rural women with the needed climate information services (CIS) and climate smart agriculture (CSA) innovations. However, radio extension is not necessarily gender neutral. In this Info Note we present insights from designing and implementing a gender-smart radio extensions programme in Ghana.

The approach was used to disseminate site-specific climate-information services, agro advisories, and climate-smart agriculture technologies for AICCRA Ghana Cluster priority value chains