Achieving gender and social equality in agri-food systems can result in greater food security and better nutrition for all—and transform food systems to be more just, resilient and sustainable. Equitable food systems are essential to achieving SDG 5, whose gender equality goal is intrinsically valuable and whose achievement supports progress across all other SDGs. Current thinking has evolved from focusing on gender gaps to enabling gender-transformative change in agri-food systems, fostering gender and social equality and women’s empowerment.

Climate change affects every aspect of the food system, including all nodes along agrifood value chains from production to consumption, the food environments in which people live, and outcomes, such as diets and livelihoods. Women and men often have specific roles and responsibilities within food systems, yet structural inequalities (formal and informal) limit women’s access to resources, services and agency. These inequalities affect the ways in which women and men experience and are affected by climate change.

Climate variability and extreme weather events such as floods and droughts continue to increase due to climate change. These changes will have significant impacts on low- and middle-income countries. Without transformative climate adaptation solutions, millions of smallholder farmers will face severe losses because of increased climate variability.

The workshop provided overview on the food systems landscape in Kenya, and to identify opportunities to inform inputs on crop diversification, livestock, land use expansion, and irrigation. It also contributed immensely into policy and stakeholder mapping exercise in Kenya.

Plant genetic resources (PGR), including collections held in national and international gene banks, provide access to a wide array of genetic diversity and are critical to genomics research, conservation efforts, and applied breeding. Yet, there is a general lack of awareness in the research community about the rules and treaties that govern the use of PGR, about access and benefit sharing obligations contained in international treaties and/or national laws, and about how best to comply with potentially applicable requirements.

This perspective describes the opportunities and challenges of data-driven approaches for crop diversity management (genebanks and breeding) in the context of agricultural research for sustainable development in the Global South. Data-driven approaches build on larger volumes of data and flexible analyses that link different datasets across domains and disciplines. This can lead

Landraces are traditional crop varieties that often have special adaptations to the farming environment in which they have evolved and are therefore a valuable source of useful traits for plant breeders. In most agriculturally advanced countries, landraces of the main crops have generally been superseded by modern varieties. An exception to this in the United Kingdom is the cultivation on the Scottish archipelagos of Orkney, Shetland and the Outer Hebrides of three cereal landraces: bere, a 6-row barley (Hordeum vulgare), small oat (Avena strigosa) and Hebridean rye (Secale cereale).

Over the past 20 years, recurrent and violent conflicts between farmers and Fulani pastoralists have persisted in Northern Ghana. These conflicts mainly revolve around access to and utilisation of natural resources such as land and water. Conflicts of interest have led to the social marginalisation of the Fulani community, leading to their exclusion from formal landscape governance processes.

Acid tropical soils may become more productive when treated with agricultural lime, but optimal lime rates have yet to be determined in many tropical regions. In these regions, lime rates can be estimated with lime requirement models based on widely available soil data. We reviewed seven of these models and introduced a new model (LiTAS). We evaluated the models’ ability to predict the amount of lime needed to reach a target change in soil chemical properties with data from four soil incubation studies covering 31 soil types.

The Innovation for Africa Climate Risk Insurance, InACRI project, addresses the current poor performance and uptake of index-based crop insurance products in Kenya. As part of the outputs to improve adoption the project developed a farmer guide to provide them with information on crop insurance such as the advantages of crop insurance, types of crop insurance, what to consider when choosing an insurance policy, the claims process, and the costs associated with crop insurance.

The Call for Applications resulted in a total of 849 applicants, out of which 288 met the high-quality standards for prequalification. The accelerator program successfully attracted women-led or co-led agribusinesses, with 69% of applicants featuring at least one woman in the founding team. The majority of applicants (72%) indicated that they were targeting smallholder farmers in their business model, and 52% claimed to have a digital innovation, highlighting the potential for technology in transforming the food systems sector.