Smallholder farmers in Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, and South Africa face a growing gap between what their land produces and what their families need to eat, as droughts, heatwaves, and pest infestations become more frequent and severe. This matters because across Sub-Saharan Africa, undernourishment remains high, and low agricultural productivity traps rural households in cycles of poverty. Governments see farming as an engine for economic growth, but climate change, environmental degradation, and limited access to resources make transformation difficult. Previous efforts toward the Millennium Development Goals stalled in some countries due to policy paralysis—a lack of actionable evidence and institutional capacity to act. The project brings together climate scientists, ecologists, soil and water experts, nutritionists, and policy analysts from the University of Leeds, the University of Aberdeen, the UK Met Office, FANRPAN, and Chatham House. They will work directly with researchers and policymakers in four countries to identify practical pathways for making agriculture more productive, climate-resilient, and environmentally sustainable. If successful, the research could shift national policies away from paralysis toward evidence-based strategies that improve food security, reduce poverty, and protect soils, water, and biodiversity—not just in the four focus countries, but across the continent through regional policy networks.
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Agricultural development is fundamental to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Sub-Saharan Africa. Levels of undernourishment and malnutrition remain high across the region and current trends show a growing gap between the food needs of a growing population and agricultural productivity. Moreover, in a context of changing climates, and, in many areas, increased incidence of extreme and unprecedented events (notably drought and extreme heat, as well as increasingly extreme rainfall and crop pest infestations), the increased risk of crop failures is exacerbating this challenge. Across Africa, governments recognise that agricultural development and transformation needs to be an engine of economic growth and poverty alleviation, particularly where cycles of low productivity (and periodic crop failures), limited access to resources, and small land holdings lock rural households into cycles of poverty. Agricultural practice must also contribute to the sustaining of soil, water, biodiversity and more, and is increasingly being targeted as a sector within which we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Achieving sustainable and resilient transformations of agriculture and food systems in Africa is a complex and multi-faceted challenge, which requires novel approaches to research and evidence and new policy and institutional enabling environments. This project sets out to collaboratively build the capacities required across research and policy to tackle this multi-faceted challenge, and help avoid the policy paralysis that in some countries led to little or no progress towards the Millennium Development goals. The project team, which includes the University of Leeds, University of Aberdeen, the UK Met Office, the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) and Chatham House encompasses expertise in agriculture, climate, ecology, soils, water, post-harvest losses, land use, nutrition and health, rural livelihoods, and policy and institutional analysis. FANRPAN is a multi-stakeholder pan-African network whose mission is to build resilient food systems across Africa through the assessment and creation of food, agriculture and natural resources policies that are both evidence-based and developed in partnership with non-state actors. We will address research and capacity growth under 3 broad themes: (1) how to make agriculture (and food systems) productive as well as resilient to extreme weather whilst minimising impacts on the environment and maximising its contributions to livelihoods, and food and nutrition (2) as the economic and food-security demands on agriculture change over the next decades, and at the same time weather and climate risks change, what are the feasible ways that agriculture can develop to become more productive in order to meet future needs? (3) how can policy be developed that enables potential sustainable, productive, climate-resilient pathways to be realised in the most inclusive way, thus maximising the contribution of agriculture to achieving the SDGs? Work will be focused in four countries in SSA: Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia -which are low income countries with varied farming systems - and South Africa, which is an upper middle income country. In each country, research and policy capacity will be built through collaborative partnerships across academic institutions, non-governmental organisations, and policy makers. Through FANRPAN and Chatham House' s inter-governmental policy expertise and platforms, we aim to generate lessons learned from our case-study countries and disseminate them across Africa to contribute to capacity building and evidence-based agricultural transformation through the application of a similar model of evidence into policy in other African countries, and at the regional level.
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