This report contributes to Output 2.1. Baseline – current conditions of agricultural systems of smallholder farmers in the identified Agroecological Living Landscape (ALL) and provides context to their current state. Therefore, the document is a Context Assessment report that is developed and maintained to ensure a thorough understanding of the operational context as well as that of the stakeholders and communities. This document is a living document and will continuously evolve. For Zimbabwe, the ALLs are at the district level, with two sub-ALLs at the ward level.

The potential of organic agriculture and agroecological approaches for improving food security in Africa is a controversial topic in global discussions. While there is a number of meta-analyses on the environmental, agronomic and financial performance of organic farming, most of the underlying data stems from on-station field trials from temperate regions. Data from sub-Sahara Africa in particular, as well as detailed real-farm data is scarce. How organic farming is implemented in sub-Saharan Africa and how it performs in a smallholder context remains poorly understood.

Agriculture has remained central to the livelihoods of millions of Africans. Yet, far too many agriculture-dependent Africans remain food insecure and malnourished. Agriculture is vulnerable to climate shocks. The number of undernourished people rose from 195 million in 2006 to 256 million in 2018. By the end of 2018, more than 65 million people across 33 African countries faced "crisis" levels of acute food insecurity or worse. The COVID-19 crisis is expected to worsen food insecurity in the region further, making resilience-building an even more urgent task.

The Gabgachhia village is located in the coastal region of Bangladesh’s Khulna district. It is one of the seven villages selected for the CCAFS midline household survey. The village was also selected for the village midline study (VMS).

Enhancing farmers' access to improved seeds is essential to increase productivity and ensure food security in the Global South. However, for many socially marginalized groups, seed access is constrained by the weak institutions governing the input supply chains and the dissemination of information.

In October 2023, IWMI organized a workshop with the National Agency of Civil Aviation and Meteorology (ANACIM) and the support of Alliance Bioversity-CIAT on behalf of the CGIAR Initiative on Climate Resilience, ClimBeR, to launch the AWARE Platform in Senegal. This platform aims to provide early warning, early action, and finance and introduce a dialogue on sensitizing anticipatory action to mitigate climate risks. The workshop brought together 53 key stakeholders, including government officials, local and international NGO representatives, academic staff, and private sector experts.

This paper takes a first step in filling that gap in terms of assessing whether there is evidence to support proposals about how agricultural innovation pathways should be pursued. We have looked at the recent literature that proposes principles and approaches to achieving large-scale sustainable agriculture intensification (SAI), and disaggregated these all-inclusive approaches into individual components and hypotheses. We then tested six hypotheses through case studies of innovation pathways, trajectories, scaling and other attempts at achieving large-scale SAI.

Gender mainstreaming is seen, at international level, as critical to achieving national development goals and addressing key global challenges such as climate change and food and nutrition insecurity in the agriculture sector. Our study examined the barriers leading to poor gender mainstreaming and potential solutions in policies applying to gender, agriculture, climate change, food security and nutrition, in both Guatemala and Honduras. We used a case study approach to analyze the barriers to gender integration in these governments’ policies.

Despite the potential importance of seed quality to agricultural productivity growth, many governments in sub-Saharan Africa lack the capacity to expand quality assurance systems even where there is expressed interest. This study aims to evidence the value of quality assurance systems with an analysis of efforts to produce and distribute certified seed in Nigeria.

A food system includes all elements (environment, people, inputs, processes, infrastructures, institutions, etc.) and activities that relate to the production, processing, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food, and the outputs of these activities, including socioeconomic and environmental outcomes (HLPE 2017). Thus, a food system links society and nature (Blesh and Wittman 2015).

Links between land tenure and food and nutritional insecurity are receiving increased attention. Nevertheless,
urban and periurban dwellers face challenges in accessing land to produce food for subsistence and sale. An
ethnographic study and food and nutrition insecurity survey were conducted between October 2013 and
November 2014 in Tamale, Northern Region of Ghana, to explore the dynamic and recursive links between land

Yam (Dioscorea sp.) is an understudied tuber crop despite its importance for food security, income generation, culture, and health in West Africa. Traditional yam cropping practices in West Africa deliver low yields and lead to environmental degradation. In the context of a ‘research for development’ project, we developed and implemented a participatory and transdisciplinary research approach as a means to derive more sustainable yam production practices.