The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will amount to little unless backed by reliable indicators. Only with good metrics can the agenda be implemented and progress measured. Just like the SDGs themselves, the indicators are still in the discussion phase, with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) one of the many players in this process. They outline their recommendations in the following article, using rural development as an example to describe them.

In Kenya, smallholders are improving the health of their families by growing local cereal varieties and indigenous vegetables. The use of traditional foods is even helping people with HIV/AIDS.

Fishery plays a crucial role in poverty and hunger alleviation. It is therefore all the more important to secure the long-term conservation of fish stocks as a natural resource and to ensure fair access to them.

Over the last few decades, the range of agricultural extension and advisory services as well as the notions of which tools and methods are most suitable have seen fundamental changes. Our authors give an overview of old and new approaches, showing what we already know and where there is a need for more information.

Following the end of apartheid, South Africa’s government set itself ambitious goals with a planned land reform. However, there have since been barely any changes in the country’s agricultural structure, and the positive impacts that were hoped for on rural livelihoods have hardly materialised. A critical assessment of 22 years of land reform policies.

Rural extension services are an extremely complex affair. This is due to the wide range of constellations in which farmers operate nowadays, and also to the large number of players who are active in advisory services, with their different tasks, values and mandates. With reference to Germany’s rural extension services, our author shows who is taking on which role and where conflicts might potentially arise.

Today, it would be difficult to imagine agricultural extension without modern information and communication technologies. What they can do, where they fit in, and where they reach their limits is shown in the following examples.

The Government extension services in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are weak. There is a general lack of money and staff, and the country has a poor infrastructure. Above all small-scale farmers in remote areas are left out of developments. This applies in particular to women farmers, despite their providing 85 per cent of the rural workforce.

Publicly elected women representatives in India ought to take advantage of their influence to defend women’s rights.

German Development Cooperation has developed an approach for the sustainable production of charcoal that has proved to have a considerable impact in Northern Madagascar. Since both environmental and socioeconomic aspects are addressed in a very effective way, this approach has high potential referring to global challenges such as land degradation, rural poverty and climate change.

Despite good potential for food production, South Sudan’s agriculture is not feeding its population. The impacts of decades of armed conflict are posing enormous challenges for the sector. Farmer Field Schools seem to be a promising instrument to improve food security and livelihoods of small-scale farmers in the country.

Family farming has many different meanings to many different people. While such farms come in all shape and sizes, one thing all practitioners agree on is that family farming is more than a business – it’s a way of life. The following article shows what constitutes this way of life, the challenges that family farms in Europe and throughout the world face and why and how the European Union supports this type of enterprise.