Dear United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, "Get Cross." "Break the silence." "When you witness violence against women and girls, do not sit back. Act." Those are your words, Mr. Ban Ki-moon. As the U.N. secretary general, you have been forward about promoting gender equality and denouncing violence against women. Yet this month, at the Paris …
To harness the potential of soil microbes Africa must move quickly. As soil degrades, so too does microbial life. Understanding the microbial diversity of Africa’s soils is important for another reason as well. At least some portion of this diversity is indigenous to particular soils, crops and ecosystems developed over thousands of years of farming. At a …
The seeds of the agricultural revolution that Africa has longed for have arrived, spawned by research and tech developments incubated in America, Europe and Australia. Agriculture 3.0 in industrialised economies is a revolution fuelled by big data and streamed from an explosion of new digital, satellite and laser technology. It is parsed for farmers to …
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that over 795 million people in the world are affected by severe hunger and poverty. The majority of these people live off the land, many as smallholder farmers. Their farms often have unproductive soils and are dependent on increasingly erratic rainfall patterns. When crops do grow, they are …
The African Development Bank, Africa’s biggest lending institution, recently elected a new leader: Akinwumi Adesina. The former Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria, Adesina led an agricultural transformation in his country. Among Adesina’s revolutionary acts was the launch of a program to develop 750,000 young entrepreneurs—Nagropreneurs—in agriculture. In his new position, Adesina will have the opportunity to promote …