Sustainable Land Management in Sub-Saharan Africa:
improving livelihoods through local research
Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany, the INTERFACES Project works with four other regional projects to strengthen the integration, coherence and reach in the area of sustainable land management.
Supporting Pathways to Sustainable Land Management in Africa
Land management and the securing, use, control and governance of land-related natural resources is one of the key drivers for sustainable development in Africa. Sustainable land management should contribute to food security, adaptation of agriculture and forestry to climate change, nature and environmental protection, and be organised in a way that contributes to social justice.
INTERFACES will support the BMBF-funded regional projects in their endeavour to drive change for sustainable land management in sub-Saharan Africa.
This will be achieved through two fields of activities:
- impact-driven support activities which build on networking for the regional projects, science communication, social learning processes, and capacity development, and
- complementary transfer analyses that enable or facilitate the implementation as well as improve the relevance and outreach of the regional projects‘ research-based findings.
All activities and thinking in INTERFACES will be aligned around the question of how to achieve behaviour change, and guided by the principles of transdisciplinarity, social learning and decolonising knowledge production. All its activities shall be gender-responsive and socially inclusive.
Co-developing innovations for sustainable land management in West African smallholder farming systems
The goal of COINS is the sustainable intensification of agriculture, i.e. increasing productivity without converting additional land. The German-African project team is investigating which efficient forms of land management are effective in intensifying agriculture on the same area in a sustainable manner – taking into account local conditions such as water availability and soil properties, but also socio-economic conditions in particular.
In COINS, the relevant options are catalogued and assessed for their suitability in local contexts in study areas in northern Ghana and the Senegal River Valley in northern Senegal. In COINS, a landscape-based approach with modelling, earth observation, and data science is being pursued. This will promote improved cropping practices and management practices of sustainable intensification on productive land and soil rehabilitation practices on degraded land.
The operationalisation of support mechanisms, including comprehensive risk management strategies and an incentive and monitoring program, will set the stage for sustainable land management. Great importance is also attached to the development of a range of advisory services for farmers to implement sustainable intensification, thus supporting the achievement of the goals defined by the stakeholders.
Decision support for strengthening land resilience in the face of global challenges
Sustainable land management is increasingly important to maintaining the fragile balance between human demands and ecosystem services of available natural resources, to enhance food security, to reduce the risk of conflicts and to foster adaptation to climate change. In this context DecLaRe aims to identify recommendation domains for scalable innovations towards sustainable crop production and animal husbandry in West Africa.
Focussing on northern Benin and Ghana, DecLaRe builds on available local and scientific knowledge and databases. It enhances their use by fundamental research at the field level and modelling at the national to regional level, aiming to construct a decision support system (DSS) that can be used for land use and land management as well as for policy development.
Digital information technology will be used to project the effects of innovations on food availability, farmer income, and system resilience to climate change. Next to guiding local, regional, and international stakeholders towards sustainable land management options, a close connection between science, policy, and the private sector will facilitate effective use of the DSS by decision makers in the partner countries and beyond.
Increasing efficiency in rangeland-based livestock value chains through machine learning approaches and digital technologies
Rangeland-based livestock production is a major land use system that contributes between 15 and 60 percent to the agricultural GDP of countries in eastern and southern Africa. This type of production uses very little fossil fuel, but requires a great deal of knowledge and information.
The InfoRange project starts here and uses digitisation to make animal husbandry more efficient, developing ICT solutions together with the user groups – i.e., farms and farming authorities as well as veterinarians, among others. This involves using the knowledge of all stakeholders to work out what digital solutions for better pasture management and veterinary care might look like and what is needed for successful use of the ICT solutions. Similar to the geotagging of photos and of live traffic reports, user-generated information transmitted, for example, by livestock farmers via appropriate smartphone apps will be combined together with remotely sensed data. With the help of machine learning, patterns in different scenarios can thus be detected and analysed.
In addition to farms, InfoRange involves various decision-making bodies in the project from the beginning to produce results that can improve policy decisions.
Fostering local sustainable development through technology and research
Climate change and population growth in sub-Saharan Africa make it difficult to manage land sustainably while conserving natural resources. There is often a gap between existing, scientific concepts on sustainable land management and concrete solutions on the ground.
The Minodu project aims to close this gap by processing existing knowledge in a user-friendly way, creating local networks and developing concrete solution approaches together with the communities. It also considers how results can be shared with groups that have limited access to digital technologies. The goal is to provide and improve knowledge on topics such as climate change, sustainability, water management, and desertification, as well as relevant technologies, through various participation formats.
Together with communities in Togo, the project team is working out how to make concrete improvements on the ground toward more sustainable land use, what resources are available, and how stakeholders can benefit from a shared network with other actors. Digital technologies and social action are combined to create new opportunities and build connections between different groups. Through this hands-on approach, knowledge is sustainably anchored in all participants and an emotional connection to the topic is created.
