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.

CONTEXT: Global and national agricultural development policies normally tend to focus more on enhancing farm productivity through technological changes than on better use of existing technologies. The role of improving technical efficiency in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction from crop production is the least explored area in the agricultural sector. But improving technical efficiency is necessary in the context of the limited availability of existing natural resources (particularly land and water) and the need for GHG emission reduction from the agriculture sector.

A Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) approach is fundamental to agribusiness transformation in the Eastern and Southern Africa region. Work package 5 aims to bring about inclusive and scalable agribusiness innovations through targeted GESI support to UU ESA work packages 1-6. To achieve this, we produced this GESI framework on social, economic, political, and institutional barriers and opportunities to more inclusive agribusiness in the ESA region.

Mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana var. mangostana) is a popular tropical fruit, yet many aspects of its biology and evolutionary history are little known. Its origin remains contentious, although recent findings suggest G. mangostana L. var. malaccensis (Hook. f.) Nazre (synonym: G. malaccensis Hook. f.) as the sole progenitor. We review hypotheses on the origin of mangosteen and clarify points that have been affected by errors of fact and interpretation. The narrow focus and lack of detail in published results make their interpretation difficult.

Cocoa is an important commodity crop and source of income for millions of small-holder farmers. Nonetheless, questions on cocoa tree functioning, best management practices and climate change responses remain. Modelling is a powerful tool to address these questions, complementing experimental work that is expensive and time consuming due to the long productive cycle of the cocoa system. However, compared to other crops, cocoa modelling has not received as much attention.

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is the staple food of more than 50% of the world’s population. Manual puddled transplanted rice (PTR) system is still the predominant method of rice establishment. However, due to declining water tables, increasing water scarcity, water, labor- and energy-intensive nature of PTR, high labor wages, adverse efects of puddling on soil health and succeeding crops, and high methane emissions, this production system is becoming less proftable. These factors trigger the need for an alternative crop establishment method.

In the low fertility acid soils of the Orinoquian savannas of Colombia, Urochloa humidicola cv. Tully or Humidicola is one of the most widely planted tropical forage grasses for improving livestock productivity. Low nutritional quality of this grass limits sustainable livestock production in this region. In this study, we conducted a phenotypic evaluation under field and greenhouse conditions of one of the first hybrid populations of U. humidicola generated from the forage breeding program of CIAT. Our objective was to identify a set of new hybrids of U.

Agriculture is a sector that is very vulnerable to the effects of climate change while contributing to anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to the atmosphere. Therefore, applying Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) technologies and practices (referee hereafter as CSA technologies) that can sustainably boost productivity, improve resilience, and lower GHG emissions are crucial for a climate resilient agriculture. This study sought to identify the CSA technologies used by farmers and assess adoption levels and factors that influence them.