Food and nutritional security are major global, humanitarian concern. Currently one billion people, one sixth of the world's population, are undernourished. Projected population increase (reaching 9 billion in 2050), climate change, increased urbanisation, and the spread of crop pests and diseases add additional pressures on meeting global food demands. Achieving global food security will require the "sustainable intensification" of agricultural systems: producing more food, with less land and fewer inputs (e.g. water and chemical), while promoting the preservation of natural resources. In developing countries the full realisation of the potential benefits of improved crop varieties and agricutural technological advancements is often not reached. Farmers often do not have access to quality seed of the new varieties, nor the agronomic information required for optimal production. In many developing countries, poorly functioning agricultural extension services are a major barrier to the implementation of advances in agricultural research and technologies. Adoption by smallholder farmers requires the implementation of suitable, community-based, farmer-led seed multiplication systems; methods of disseminating information about new varieties to ensure their uptake; and maximisation of production by smallholder farmers. These issues affect all crops which lack a strong formal seed system and are a bottleneck in achieving impact of outcomes from all public sector agricultural R&D. Agri-Transfer is an interchange which pulls together the diverse and complementary expertise of three partner organisations to develop a workable and sustainable dissemination model for agronomic data collected on new crop varieties (using wheat as the test crop) to smallholder farmers in Kenya. The Agri-Transfer partnership includes the agricultural research institutions National Institute for Agricultural Botany (NIAB), Cambridge, UK and the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), Njoro, Kenya, and two not-for-profit charitable development organisations, the Malaysian Centre for Commonwealth Studies (MCSC) and the Cambridge Malaysian Education and Development Trust (CMEDT). As a pilot project Agri-Transfer will establish a wheat variety field trials and demonstration system in one of the four wheat growing regions in Kenya, Nakuru County. The project will work with a self-help, Farm Community-based Organisation (CBO) in Nakuru County, where farmers, under the direction of KARI and NIAB will run the wheat field trails. Use of an ICT-based platform, developed by MCSC/CMEDT, together with other methods currently used by NIAB and KARI, will be evaluated as methods of disseminating data obtained from the field trials to smallholder farmers.

Kenya

Achieving clean energy access and food security targets in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will require significant infrastructure expansion. Improved policy environments and governance structures are recognised as vital in scaling up funding for climate-resilient investments in renewable energy infrastructures. The efficient exploitation of land, energy and water resources and their synergised use for sustainable economic development, as well as their robustness to stressors from climate change require integrated optimisation and assessment of strategic plans in these sectors. Working with existing, widely adopted, open-source modelling tools and data, the EPIC Africa project will build on the transparent integrated assessment, and resource modelling, connecting to the already existing community of developers and users. The project will create a network of African experts to train, co-create and sustain the tools developed in the long term, which is lacking at the moment. The project will build advanced and spatially contextualised water-energy-food (WEF) models for long-term infrastructure planning. Operational WEF models with sufficient temporal and spatial resolution will be developed and used to verify cost-optimised infrastructure investment plans under different climate and socioeconomic scenarios. EPIC Africa sets out to support governance of sustainable development in SSA by forming and connecting a transition arena with stakeholders in dialogue, leading to the development of a WEF nexus digital engagement tool. Optimal use of shared resources will be exemplified for Africa using the cases of the Volta and Tana river basins. Here, we will design specific policy, investment and infrastructure plans for the coming decades in the agricultural, water and energy access sectors. The project will produce a set of institutional, regulatory and technical recommendations for sustainable management of optimised transition pathways.

Food and nutrition security (FNS) remains a challenge for Africa, despite efforts made in agricultural research and extension in the past, due to inefficient implementation and exchange of technologies and knowledge to end users. The main objective of InnovAfrica is to improve FNS by integrating sustainable agriculture intensification (SAI) systems, innovative institutional approaches (IIAs) with novel extension and advisory services (EASs) and enhancing smallholder adaptive capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). InnovAfrica addresses main challenges of the work programme (SFS-42-2016), through a strong multidisciplinary EU-Africa consortium of 16 partners, supported by 6 active Multi-Actor Platforms (MAPs) in 6 case countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania and South Africa). InnovAfrica will test, integrate, and disseminate SAI systems suitable to smallholders, institutional approaches (e.g. MAPs, seed delivery systems) and EASs (e.g. dynamic knowledge platforms supported by smart phones, Village Knowledge centers). The main outcomes of InnovAfrica include: i) better understanding of the needs and opportunities of SAI systems in Africa, ii) improved knowledge and innovation capacity of farmers to implement SAI systems supported by IIAs and EASs, iii) improved product value chains through viable IIAs benefiting women and youth, iv) Innovative policies, increased knowledge of public-private partnerships to strengthen agri-business model in case countries with a view to upscaling successes in other regions through functional MAPs, v) Wider dissemination of SAI systems to smallholders and women within and outside project areas through effective use of smart phones and social media, and vi) Stronger EU-Africa Research and Innovation Partnership to achieve FNS. The outcomes will contribute to smallholder productivity, profitability; and nutritional benefits while reducing negative environmental impacts and enhance FNS and sustainable agriculture in Africa.