Coinciding with today's International Day for Biological Diversity, the Aid by Trade Foundation announced the successful completion of a 2.8 million euro project focused on climate-resilient agriculture in Africa. Healthy soil, responsible water management and biodiversity conservation play key roles in this initiative.
The CAR-iSMa project (“Climate Adaptation and Resilience – A pan-African learning & knowledge exchange project on improved Soil Management”) involved more than 100,000 farmers across Africa over the past three years, testing various soil-improvement measures. The results are encouraging: yields on demonstration sites increased significantly, even amidst climate change.
Better yields and resilience in times of climate change
In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, these plots saw yield increases of up to 37 percent compared to fields without soil optimisation measures. After the 2022/23 harvest was severely impacted by pest infestation, participating Ivorian farmers in the programme saw an average yield increase of 272 kilograms per hectare to 1,007 kilograms per hectare in the 2023/24 season. This resulted in an average income increase of 509 euros.
Specifically, over three years, international and inter-organisational meetings were organised to test and share knowledge with local farmers and partners on the production and effects of compost, biochar and the Bokashi composting method, as well as erosion control techniques and and soil cultivation methods.
Crop rotation, crop diversification, cover crops, tree planting and integrated production and pest management were also part of the initiative. At the same time, innovative training materials were developed to ensure long-term awareness beyond the project duration, explains the Aid by Trade Foundation.
The Foundation is especially pleased that women in all project regions have taken on leadership roles, spreading the project's innovative ideas and becoming involved in compost production, which many are using as a new source of income.
“It speaks for itself that far more than our target number of 100,000 small-scale farmers chose to be trained in the theory and practice of regenerative and climate-resilient agriculture,” commented Tina Stridde, managing director of the Aid by Trade Foundation.
“In this project, we worked together with scientists, agricultural experts, and small-scale farmers to bring compost and biochar to the fields and to assess the feasibility of applying carbon credits to small-scale cotton production. We investigated new ways to secure good prospects of a stable income for small-scale farmers and their families, even in times of climate change,” added Stridde.
“For us, this project reinforced a more resilient way of working with farmers. We are now integrating many of these techniques into our core operations and exploring the potential for carbon farming initiatives, using the tested regenerative soil practices as a strong foundation,” explained Ivans Trigo Popinsky, director of production at SAN-JFS, a cotton company from Mozambique involved in the CAR-iSMa project.
Furthermore, feasibility studies on carbon sequestration were conducted to assess the potential of various soil improvement methods. These findings could, in the long term, unlock new income streams through carbon credits in smallholder cotton farming, according to the Aid by Trade Foundation.
CAR-iSMa was launched as an initiative of the Aid by Trade Foundation and funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) as part of the Sub-Saharan Cotton Initiative. The project was implemented in partnership with the agricultural group LDC Suisse and across countries with locally active cotton companies in Côte d'Ivoire, Zambia and Mozambique.