Ustadi and CTA have jointly implemented the project “Youth economic empowerment through agribusiness in Kenya (VijaBiz)” in the Nakuru and Kilifi counties in Kenya. The project aimed to create sustainable employment for rural youth through active engagement in agribusiness for wealth creation and poverty reduction. More specifically, VijaBiz built entrepreneurship capacity for 163 youth agribusiness groups in cereals, dairy and fishery value chains in the Kilifi and Nakuru counties.

Climate change threatens the livelihoods of millions of small-scale farmers in East Africa. How farmers perceive climate change and its impacts has a strong bearing on how they adapt to the adverse impacts. This paper focused on factors that determine climate change adaptation and perceptions among small-scale farmers of Embu County. A survey was carried out across five sub-counties of Embu County where a multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select 411 households. A questionnaire was administered to each household. A total of five FGDs were generated by the use of quota sampling.

We use CDRs of mobile phone users in Uganda combined with data from a phone survey to train machine-learning models to predict the sex of the mobile phone user and several indicators of economic empowerment such as ownership of a house and land, occupation, and decision-making over household income. The most accurate of the models predicts the sex of the mobile phone user with 78% accuracy. The different indicators of economic empowerment are predicted with accuracies ranging from 57% to 61%. We also predict users’ sex and economic empowerment jointly.

The problem addressed in this paper is the challenge of moving from formulating policy goals to achieving the promised results. The purpose is to assess the possible role of innovation in agriculture as a way of contributing towards achieving the Malabo Declaration commitments and the zero hunger Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2) in six African countries. Since the SDGs are high on both international and many national agendas, there is a need to increase our knowledge of how to move beyond formulating goals.

Small ruminant value chain development started in Ethiopia as part of Livestock and Fish CRP in 2012 in seven sites representing different regions of Ethiopia, production systems and communities. The objective of the initiative was to test technological and institutional innovations that would transform the small ruminant value chain and this involved rigorous procedures.

Global narratives around the links between deforestation and agricultural commodity production have led to the application of voluntary zero-deforestation agreements between companies, governments, and civil society. The continued tropical deforestation warrants a re-examination of this approach in order to customize its application for a particular location. Our paper contributes to this by exploring the spatial associations between deforestation and the production of cacao, coffee, and oil palm in the Amazon region in Peru.

Ethiopia is increasingly impacted by climate change and variability because of its greater reliance on climate-sensitive economic sectors such as agriculture. The impacts of climate change and variability are greater on a poor section of the rural community in particular because of their weak adaptive capacities. In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on promoting climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and climate information services (CIS) to improve climate risk management and adaptation of smallholders to climate change in Ethiopia.

CIP, in partnership with Orgamed Farms Ltd and Stokman Rozen Kenya conducted a scoping exercise to assess
private interest in seed production, and the potato sector and partners in general. This scoping report maps
partners relevant to potato development and provides an agro-ecological and socio-economic assessment of
potential areas for developing potato sector considering differing profiles of value chains: rural, food security
focused, urban, commercially driven. The scoping exercise shows great potential to uplift the potato sector to

Effective assessments of the current status of biodiversity conservation are needed to support planning, policy and action, from local to global levels. Of particular use would be well documented, reproducible methods based on openly accessible data and tools. Such methods should provide an accurate estimate of the state of conservation of diversity, identifying gaps in current conservation systems, while providing a benchmark against which to measure success, including determining when conservation goals have been met.