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- Feed Preview Inter Press ServiceAfrica’s Young Farmers Seeding the Future – Inter Press Service
Using Climate-Smart Solutions to Promote Peace in South Sudan
Almost a month to go ahead of the traditional rainy season in Gbudue State, 430 kilometres west of South Sudan’s capital, Juba, smallholder farmers are already tilling their land as they prepar...
Developing Agriprenuers to Save Nigeria’s Youth from Crime
When Lawrence Afere told his parents he was going into farming rather than getting a job in Nigeria’s lucrative oil and gas sector, they swore he was bewitched. “After saving to put me throug...
Farmers Secure Land and Food Thanks to ‘Eyes in the Skies’
Six years ago while wondering how best to use her engineering skills, Tanzanian ICT entrepreneur Rose Funja decided to enter an innovation competition. Years later she has turned a digital idea i...
Uganda Still Grapples with Inadequate Funds to Tackle Climate Change
Until last month, Allen Nambozo’s only source of income was the cabbages, carrots and bananas she grew along the slopes of Uganda’s Mount Elgon in the eastern district of Bulambuli. But wee...
Africa Pays the Price of Low Harvests Thanks to Costly Fertilisers
Eherculano Thomas Rice, is pleased to have harvested 40 bags of white maize from his eight-hectare field in Chimoio, in Mozambique’s Manica Province. But he knows that his productivity and yiel...
Kenya’s Ogiek Women Conquer Cultural Barriers to Support their Families
Just two years ago, Mary Ondolo, a 50-year-old mother of nine from Kenya’s marginalised, hunter-gatherer community, the Ogiek, used to live in a grass thatched, mud house. She’d been living t...
Uganda’s Youth Discover the Beauty in Farming
Before she entered the Miss Uganda beauty contest, 24-year-old Fiona Nassaka was a farmer. “You grow your lettuce, you go and supply it to any market like Capital Shoppers and you get your mon...
As Uganda Heats Up, Pests and Disease Flourish to Attack its Top Export Crop
When Abudu Zikusoka was a small boy his father would bring people to their home in Ndesse village in Central Uganda’s Mukono district. He would watch as they packed the family’s harvested cof...
Africa’s Dividing Farmlands A Threat To Food Security
When Kiprui Kibet pictures his future as a maize farmer in the fertile Uasin Gishu county in Kenya’s Rift Valley region, all he sees is the ever-decreasing plot of land that he has to farm on. ...
War Veterans Planting for Peace in South Sudan
Along the fertile banks of sub-Saharan Africa’s White Nile, one of the two main tributaries of the Nile River, a war veteran’s co-op is planting for a food secure future in South Sudan, a cou...
How Farming is Making Côte d’Ivoire’s Prisoners ‘Feel Like Being Human Again’
François Kouamé, prisoner Number 67, proudly shows off a sow and her four piglets. Dressed in his rubber boots, he passes by two new tractors as he happily makes his way to a field where prett...
Mauritian Sugar Farmers Squeezed by Low Prices as Bagasse and Ethanol Become Popular By-products
While Mauritius has been forced to transform its sugar industry because of low prices for the commodity, the country’s small-scale sugarcane farmers who contribute to it say they are barely ear...
Zimbabwe’s Emerging Tobacco Queens
Madeline Murambwi sits behind the wheel of her brand new Toyota Land Cruiser, threading her way through the traffic in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. She’s on her way back from the tobacco auct...
Q&A: Investment and Research Key to Resilient African Agriculture
There is urgent need to increase the proportion of climate finance for adaptation in Africa by increasing public sector budgets for agriculture and exploring partnerships with the private sector....
Zimbabwe’s Urban Farmers Combat Food Insecurity — But it’s Illegal
It is harvest season in Zimbabwe and Janet Zondo is pressed to find space on the piece of land she is farming to erect a makeshift granary. Zando says she could very well build a miniature silo,...
Kenya’s Pastoralists Show their Green Thumbs
For more than a decade Dima Wario from Rupa, a village in Merti division, northern Kenya, escaped death and watched helplessly as many in his community died in a spate of fatal clashes over reced...
Biofortified Beans to Fight ‘Hidden Hunger’ in Rwanda
Joane Nkuliye considers herself an activist. She is part of a select group of farmers producing biofortified crops on a commercial scale in Rwanda. Nkuliye owns 25 hectares in Nyagatare distric...
Africa’s Youth Not Lured by Unglamorous Farming
Ketsela Negatu is the son of an Ethiopian goat farmer living close to the country’s capital, Addis Ababa, who refuses to follow in his father’s footsteps. The 19-year-old has negative percept...
Brazilian Innovation for Under-financed Mozambican Agriculture
Some of the technological excellence that revolutionised Brazil’s tropical agriculture is reaching small producers in Mozambique. But it is not enough to compensate for the underfinancing of th...
Kenya’s Empty Bread Basket
Jane Njeri from the semi-arid lower Mukurweini district in Kenya’s Central Province has taken to boiling wild roots to feed her five children. Her children, all of whom are under the age of 10,...
Resistance Over GMOs as South Africa Pushes Biotechnology
On a family farm tucked between the rolling hills of Masopane, 40 km outside of South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, 35-year-old Sophie Mabhena is dreaming big about her crop of genetically modifi...
Restoring Sight to Africa’s Gender-Blind Rice Sector
For more than 20 years, Anastasia Ngwakun from Bamunkumbit village in central Cameroon has been farming rice the hard way – using only hand tools. But Ngwakun knows that if she were a man, she ...
Malawi’s Failed Subsidy Programme Left Millions to Starve
Gogo Munthali, from Rumphi, a village over 400 km north of Malawi’s capital Lilongwe, dissolves into tears every morning as she worries about what to feed her five orphaned grandchildren, the y...
Protecting Tanzania’s Farmers from Weather Extremes
When Habiba Msoga from Kiroka village, in Tanzania’s Morogoro Region, first began applying a method of rice cultivation that was different from what her fellow farmers traditionally used, they ...
Improved Seed Improves Ethiopian Farmers’ Lives
Ethiopian farmers are learning that seed security is the basis of food security. After a successful trial, the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations in 2013 began introducing h...
Seeding Ethiopia’s Future Food Security
Datta Dudettu and his seven children know what is like to go hungry. They live in Woliyta, a drought-prone area in southern Ethiopia that has experienced chronic food shortages. But hopefully, ...
Africa’s Farmers Seek Private Money
Africa currently imports almost 40 billion dollars worth of food a year, but it should implement measures to attract private sector investment in agriculture in order to reduce its food import bi...
Slum Farmers Rise Above the Sewers
Tucked deep in Kenya’s sprawling Kibera slum is the shanty that Alice Atieno calls home. It is just one among many small, badly-lit shacks built close together in this crowded slum where an est...
Smallholders Feed a Nation as Land Reform Fails
Moses Chiengerere is one of the Zimbabwe’s hundreds of thousands of smallholder maize farmers keeping this southern African nation’s granaries stocked with the grain. “I make it a point tha...
Insuring Ghana’s Smallholder Farmers Against the Weather
Smallholder farmer Suleman Mustapha Simbia, 40, is pleased with the introduction of an insurance initiative called the Ghana Agriculture Insurance Programme. The programme is being implemented in...
In Kenya, Small Is Vulnerable
With the country’s food security and farmers’ livelihoods at risk from climate change, Kenya has divergent policy options. One is reliant on deploying new technologies as well as improving an...
Oiling the Palms of Cameroon’s Farmers
In Maleke village, western Cameroon, an oil palm tree is considered to be “black gold”. At least, that is what Joseph Tesse, the local processor of oil palm, tells IPS. “Every household her...
What’s Good for Brazil Is Good for Africa
As Africa transforms its economy, it will need modern jobs and increased productivity to fight hunger on the continent, African leaders agreed at a two-day summit. The leaders agreed that agricul...
Q&A: Generating Global Governance to End Hunger
Matthew Newsome interviews JOSÉ GRAZIANO DA SILVA, FAO director general
Bright Ideas Will Help Feed Africa’s Poor
Across Africa, smallholder farmers, who are some of the world’s most impoverished people, are slowly being introduced to innovative approaches, such as entrepreneurial loan schemes and conserva...