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Sustainable agricultural development has long been heralded as a vital pathway to alleviating poverty and hunger in Africa, where smallholder farming predominates across diverse landscapes and local conditions changing due to climate impacts and other factors. Sustainable intensification (SI) approaches—tailored to local conditions—offer a range of farming techniques designed to improve growing conditions, yields, and measures of well-being including food security.

Crop mapping—identifying what farmers are growing on their fields—is essential to agricultural and land use planning and management. It is used to generate yield estimates and crop acreage statistics, predict food prices and assess damages from disasters and also to evaluate ecosystem health—all functions essential for agricultural export nations such as Kenya.

Creating opportunities to more effectively link farmers in Africa south of the Sahara with local, regional, and global markets has become a key development focus in recent years. However, questions remain about the impacts that increased agricultural commercialization may have on household food consumption and food and nutrition security. A recent article in Food Security examines such impacts in Ghana, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe and finds both positive and negative trade-offs to increased market integration.

Millions of people across 22 countries and territories may be pushed into acute food insecurity by May 2025, according to the latest FAO-WFP Hunger Hotspots Report. Ongoing and increasing conflict in many areas of the world, along with economic hardships and extreme weather caused by climate change and the La Niña phenomenon, are behind this significant increase in both the magnitude and the severity of acute food insecurity.

Soil degradation, mainly caused by soil erosion and nutrient depletion, is a key factor undermining agricultural productivity, food security, and livelihoods in low- and middle-income countries. Soil degradation is a key problem in Uganda, which has seen growing soil health challenges. To address this issue, IFPRI, the CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains, and Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) have initiated a new round of a long-term, gender-disaggregated soil health survey in Uganda.