Every week, RuralReporters.com collate reports on development issues in rural Africa and its environs.
This report includes some of our top picks from recent must-read research, interviews, blogs, and in-depth articles, carefully selected to help you keep up with global issues.
Here are some of the updates you may have missed from the previous week:
India to Set Up India-Africa Agriculture, Rural Development Center
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of India signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development Consultancy Service to set up the India-Africa Institute of Agriculture and Rural Development (IAIARD) in Malawi.
The initiative seeks to complement the government’s efforts to enhance capacity in areas of agro-financing and entrepreneurship development for African countries, a statement from the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Wednesday.
IAIARD will be a Pan-African Institute wherein trainers, not only from Malawi but also from other African countries, will receive training programs in areas of micro-financing and agro-financing.
SADC initiates hub to fight climate change in rural areas
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) region has initiated a knowledge sharing website that will act as a hub for addressing climate change in rural areas, Malawi24 reported.
The hub which is set to benefit farmers was introduced by the Centre for Coordination of Agricultural Research and Development for Southern Africa (CCARDESA).
According to the Malawi Ministry of Agriculture’s Knowledge Management and Communication Specialist, Upile Muharika, the website will enable farmers in the SADC region to share knowledge and get information on what is happening in other countries. He said this will improve agricultural technologies through capacity building.
Farmer turns his house into relief center in Mozambique
I t began with a farmer who wanted to see how his neighbors had weathered a deadly cyclone. It has turned into an extraordinary grassroots relief operation that has helped thousands in rural Mozambique.
Helicopters land in the farmhouse’s driveway. Aid workers in matching T-shirts sleep in tents in the front yard and on the roof. And hundreds of local subsistence farmers whose lives were swept away by the floods drop by to collect the food and supplies to start again.
“We’ve been at it for … three weeks? I’ve lost track of time,” the farmhouse’s sole resident in normal times, mango farmer Gilles van de Wall, told The Associated Press after another frenetic day.
Rural areas remain underserved compared to urban areas and face a wide array of challenges across the globe: rural areas struggle with environmental crisis in China; severe agrarian crisis in India, and acute shortage of jobs for the growing youth populations in Africa. To overcome these challenges, the report calls for rural revitalization, highlighting policies, institutions, and investments that can transform rural areas into vibrant and healthy places to live, work and raise families.
“Revitalizing rural areas can stimulate economic growth and begin to address the crises in developing countries, and also tackle challenges holding back achievement of the SDGs and climate goals by 2030,” said Shenggen Fan, director general, IFPRI. “Rural revitalization is timely, achievable, and, most important, critical to ending hunger and malnutrition in just over a decade,” said Fan.
Our Rural Poverty Story Must Change!
Rural dwellers in Africa especially, should not be forced to use social media to change their circumstances. For this reason, leaders across the continent must wake up! This is for the simple reason that the story of poverty and hunger which has been painted in rural Africa and other developing worlds has gone on for a long time without anyone showing concern.
Figures produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) show that, majority of the world’s poor live in rural areas: rural populations account for 45.3 percent of the world’s population, but 70 percent of the world is extremely poor.
In Africa, the story is so vivid that, one wonders if the leaders really care. What has been done so far is the production of documents on strategies and programmes, as if these were all that was needed to accelerate development. As a matter of fact, if that was all that was required, Africa would have long solved its rural poverty problem.
WHO: Determining To Achieve Universal Health Coverage For Africa Through Strategic Partnerships
Irked by the continued loss of lives in Africa to both communicable and non communicable diseases and the quantum of economic losses this has translated to the GDP of its 47 member countries , the World Health Organisation(WHO) Africa regional office, seems to have in more practical terms put on its thinking cap in search of solution to the perennial outbreak of diseases in various countries with the aim of achieving universal health coverage and health security for all in the continent and ensure delivery of quality health care services to the people of Africa.
Indeed, WHO Africa regional office, from all indications, is no longer at ease with the rate at which not only communicable and non communicable disease also joint efforts of parasitic diseases, maternal, neonatal and nutrition-related conditions; are fast draining from the continent the much needed life,health and strength of its citizens, a situation which is fast affecting the productivity of each country and has translated to loss in GDP of the economy.
Farmcrowdy group launches farmgate Africa to assist rural farmers
To bridge gaps between rural farmers and the market place, the Farmcrowdy Group (FCG) has launched a new subsidiary, Farmgate Africa, a technology-driven agro-trading market place for agriculture commodities in the continent.
The Guardian learnt that based on the operational expertise provided by the Farmcrowdy Group since its establishment, Farmgate Africa, will over the next two years, focus on deploying funds across various market points, which will focus on beef processing and developing aggregation capacities across maize, soybean, sorghum and dried-split ginger for markets across Nigeria, UAE and UK.
Established in 2016, Farmcrowdy becomes Nigeria’s foremost leading agri-tech company, empowering over 12,000 farmers across 13 states; reared close to two million birds, cultivated over 16,000 acres with over 35,000 farm units sold.