Background

Healthy soil is essential to attaining high crop and livestock productivity, enhancing fertilizer and water use efficiency, and it is the foundation for sustained farm income. Recognizing that healthy soil is crucial for sustainable agriculture, major economies, including Norway,  pledged support to enhance soil health and fertilizer use efficiency. In Africa, there is currently no comprehensive, consistent, and integrated soil information system that offers compatible information across datasets and geographies. Whilst public and private datasets exist, the high effort required to combine them to offer intelligence and critical knowledge for sustainable and productive agriculture is too high.

It is crucial to collaboratively assess existing needs, map opportunities, and determine the key processes to establish such soil data infrastructures and interconnect them into regional and continental Soil Knowledge Exchange networks. Through new funding and a framework for international cooperation, Norway is supporting country- and region-led initiatives for fertilizer efficiency and soil health to deliver results in the short-term. 

In 2024, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) engaged Varda and CIFOR-ICRAF in a pilot initiative aimed at laying the groundwork to establish a collaborative and conducive framework to expand soil data, information, and knowledge availability in two countries: Kenya and Tanzania. The initiative identifies pathways to further advance and scale the exchange of data, information, and knowledge on soil among the research community, government actors and policy makers, private companies, and farmers across East Africa. The results of the pilot initiative will inform the way forward for scaling soil information systems across the African continent.

Purpose

The initiative included a survey of existing soil health initiatives (27 Aug-30 Oct, 2024), two in-country workshops to develop user cases and validate the results of the survey (22-23 Oct, 2024 in Kenya; 24-25 Oct, 2024 in Tanzania), and a final analysis of the pilot results to document and map existing initiatives and outputs related to soil data and information service providers and users in Kenya and Tanzania to understand the current landscape and identify opportunities for improvement, innovation, and integration (Jan 2025).

This webinar will present the results of the pilot, and offer the opportunity for key stakeholders to reflect and map the way forward for SISs in Africa.