News Overview

The African Development Bank (AfDB) Director of Agriculture and Agro-Industry, Dr Martin Fregene, paid a working visit to IITA Director General and CGIAR Regional Director for Africa, Dr Simeon Ehui, at the institute’s headquarters in Ibadan recently. He also visited the Fertilizer and Soil Health Hub for West Africa and the Sahel, launched in June 2024. The Regional Hub for

Aflatoxin contamination remains a major challenge in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), threatening food and feed safety, public health, and trade. Farmers, industries, and policymakers need effective, scalable solutions to protect staple crops such as maize, groundnut, and sorghum from aflatoxin. One of the most promising innovations is biocontrol using native, atoxigenic Aspergillus flavus strains—applied in the field to outcompete toxin-producing fungi. While small-scale

By Carlo Azzarri, Beliyou Haile, and Sedi-Anne Boukaka February 24, 2025 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

Agrobiodiversity is at the heart of Jai Chand Rana’s career, spanning more than three decades of research. Rana is the newest recipient of the prestigious Dr. L.C. Sikka Endowment Award for the Biennium 2023-2024 from the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS). Acting as the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT’s country representative since 2017, Rana along with Agrobiodiversity team of

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT is developing a new climate data toolkit with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), with support from the McKnight Foundation (a Minnesota-based family foundation that prioritizes investments in global collaboration for resilient food systems), that will enable researchers to analyze climate risks to better understand how farming systems respond to stress and shocks,

Climate change poses a significant threat to the agriculture sector globally, with the livestock industry being a key player in both contributing to and suffering from the impacts of climate change. A recent study conducted by L&C provided a closer look at how Kenyan dairy farmers perceive and are prepared to adopt climate change mitigation strategies. The research focuses on