Regional Farmers Organisations

This presentation gives an overview of the CCARDESA Knowledge Management  Systems

Climate change is now known to be a key threat to achieving sustainable development and poverty reduction targets, as well as attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in Africa. Climate change is altering rainfall patterns, water availability, and sea levels; it is increasing droughts and the frequency of bushfires, and increasingly impacting on human health, agricultural productivity, forests and biodiversity. In this way, climate change will negatively affect the social, economic and environmental dimensions of human livelihoods in Africa.

Lesotho Agricultural College [LAC] is committed to providing professional education and training, promoting research and community outreach, providing guidance on commercialized agriculture, through combining quality theory, practicals and research methodologies. The College strives to remain relevant, forward-thinking, industry-related in developing graduates who are thinkers and practitioners. The College programmes involve practicals and theoretical knowledge facilitated by highly skilled academic professionals by ensuring that students are well equipped to enter the world-of-work confidently upon graduation.

With this intent, through the Department of Crops [CPD], LAC is engaged in collaborative partnerships with other Government ministries and Departments, NGOs, and commercial farmers to create a platform for internship. Through this initiative, the CPD placed the first group of students of Diploma in Agriculture (General) and Diploma in Agriculture (Crop production) for an internship at the Department of Agricultural Research [DAR] and to thirty-two (32) farmers who are actively engaged in horticulture enterprises in Lesotho. These enterprises and farms were selected based on their accessibility to the students. The internship ran from the 27th June 2022 to 22nd July 2022.

Study on Improving Existing Policies to Support Cross Border Trade in Agricultural Inputs and Commodities and National Trainings on Agricultural Innovation System Policy Practice Index in the SADC Region Inception Report

Regional Knowledge, Information & Data Capture Guidelines Regional Training Workshop Report:

SADC Futures: Developing Foresight Capacity for Climate Resilient Agricultural Development Final technical report

  TORS-Development of Climate Smart Agriculture Training Materials                                                                                            

CCARDESA is a key player in Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) activities and wants to take the AR4D agenda forward by ensuring that Agricultural Transformation embraces digitalization because it has the potential to provide productivity and sustainability gains for the whole agricultural sector. Significant changes in agricultural systems are anticipated because of the convergence of new digital technologies which have the potential to change farming along whole value chains. The demand for region-specific digital technologies for agricultural innovations, coupled with a conducive enabling environment, calls for a systematic assessment of levels of availability of relevant digital systems and the extent to which such technologies are accessible in each of the SADC countries.

Success in fighting poverty in Africa will largely depend on the extent to which rural poverty is reduced as it is largely a rural phenomenon. By examining the rural development strategies of the East African Community, Economic Community of West African States and the Association of South East Asian Nations, the purpose of this study was to determine their relationship to rural poverty reduction. The Rural Development Strategy Soundness Model and Rural Web Model tools were used to examine the soundness and cohesiveness of implementation, respectively. The results showed that rural poverty declined where a rural development strategy had both been sound and cohesively implemented. We concluded that a positive correlation exists between a sound and cohesively implemented rural development strategy and rural poverty reduction. We deduced from this that the former is a missing link in Africa’s fight against rural poverty

Success in fighting poverty in Africa will largely depend on the extent to which rural poverty is reduced as it is largely a rural phenomenon. By examining the rural development strategies of the East African Community, Economic Community of West African States and the Association of South East Asian Nations, the purpose of this study was to determine their relationship to rural poverty reduction. The Rural Development Strategy Soundness Model and Rural Web Model tools were used to examine the soundness and cohesiveness of implementation, respectively. The results showed that rural poverty declined where a rural development strategy had both been sound and cohesively implemented. We concluded that a positive correlation exists between a sound and cohesively implemented rural development strategy and rural poverty reduction. We deduced from this that the former is a missing link in Africa’s fight against rural poverty