News & Blogs

In Africa’s Sahel region, agroforestry techniques using traditional plantings known as “fertiliser trees” to increase soil fertility, as well as harvesting and grazing regulations, are offering new solutions to both food and human security.Such approaches were nearly lost in recent decades following devastating droughts in the Sahel. Now they are making a belated but welcome comeback. According to a 2012 U.S. Geological Survey, “regeneration agroforestry” in the Sahel stands at over 5 million hectares of agricultural fields newly covered by trees – and growing. Continue Reading

Can the practice known as evergreen agriculture deliver both increased food and nutritional security to millions across Africa, and also have the potential to re-green the continent? Tony Barlett, the Forestry Research Program Manager with the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, thinks so.Click here to read more. Continue Reading

Scientists have reported in Nature that the agroforestry approach of planting nutrient-fixing trees with food crops could help replenish Africa's poor quality soils, tackling one of the biggest threats to food security on the continent. Planting certain perennial trees together with food crops can more than double yields for maize and millet, which are among Sub-Saharan Africa's staple foods, scientists say. Continue Reading

The story of Rhoda Mang’Anya, a farmer in Malawi, is one of the best examples of possible pathways to sustainable intensification. Although it is not a story from Africa RISING, it illustrates very well the kind of pathways that Africa RISING would like to enable.Rhoad Mang’Anya acquired her half-hectare plot in the early 1990′s. The plot was divided between a ‘winter season’ plot and a garden, where she had planted maize. Continue Reading

Growing leguminous trees on maize farms — a form of agroforestry — can boost and stabilise maize yields, a 12-year study in Malawi and Zambia has found. The researchers behind the study, from the Kenya-based World Agroforestry Centre and the University of Pretoria, South Africa, say this is the first analysis of long-term crop yield trends in cereal-legume agroforestry systems in Southern Africa. Continue Reading

The National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) has called for the need for communities to adopt the Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) concept of the World Vision to fight desertification. The FMNR involves selecting and pruning stems regenerating from stumps of naturally grown trees on the field to give them more space to grow. Continue Reading