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.
The Africa Research in Sustainable Intensification for the Next Generation (Africa RISING or AR) program aimed at producing more output per unit of land in a way that also enhances soil, crop, and ecosystem health for smallholder farming systems. For more than a decade (2012-2022) it operated in six countries in three geographically distinct regions: Ethiopian highlands (crop-livestock-based farming); West Africa (cereal-legume-livestock-based, in Ghana and Mali); and East and Southern Africa (maize-legume-livestock-based, in Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia).