Minodu
Climate change and population growth in sub-Saharan Africa make it difficult to manage land sustainably while conserving natural resources. There is often a gap between existing, scientific concepts on sustainable land management and concrete solutions on the ground.
The Minodu project aims to close this gap by processing existing knowledge in a user-friendly way, creating local networks and developing concrete solution approaches together with the communities. It also considers how results can be shared with groups that have limited access to digital technologies. The goal is to provide and improve knowledge on topics such as climate change, sustainability, water management, and desertification, as well as relevant technologies, through various participation formats.
Together with communities in Togo, the project team is working out how to make concrete improvements on the ground toward more sustainable land use, what resources are available, and how stakeholders can benefit from a shared network with other actors. Digital technologies and social action are combined to create new opportunities and build connections between different groups. Through this hands-on approach, knowledge is sustainably anchored in all participants and an emotional connection to the topic is created.
Fostering new farming practices and innovation adoption among female and male smallholder farmers, including marginalised groups requires addressing the economic, environmental and socio-cultural dimensions of development and contribute to social justice and gender equity. This is not a self-evident process as some innovations have contributed to adverse environmental or social effects, resulting in low adoption rates and unsuccessful scaling of innovations. In this briefing series we highlight the reasons for low adoption rates among smallholder farmers and how gender-responsive innovation adoption can be fostered.
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Our bi-monthly blog is intended for project staff as well as interested stakeholders from science, policy and practice, to share experiences and mutually learn. It is an opportunity to showcase the multi-faceted nature in which we improve livelihoods and support sustainable land management through local research.
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Our bi-monthly blog is intended for project staff as well as interested stakeholders from science, policy and practice, to share experiences and mutually learn. It is an opportunity to showcase the multi-faceted nature in which we improve livelihoods and support sustainable land management through local research.
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The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) funds transdisciplinary research on sustainable land management in order to improve livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa.
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This video was taken during the first Status Seminar held in hybrid form (first day only) and online 26-28 April 2023 at IDOS in Bonn.
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Rapid climate change is exposing subsistence farmers to enormous challenges, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Several foreign aid programs have been set up to cope with these issues, many of which have focused on technical solutions. However, there seems to be a large gap between scientific research and the needs of local communities. Besides focusing on new ways to improve the resilience of local food production, there is also an urgent need to adapt available knowledge to the local context. Based on experiences from a project to co-create community networks in Togo in 2020, we aim to empower local stakeholders, including farmers and scientists, to adapt existing knowledge of sustainable crop farming to current practices. New modes of knowledge exchange can be established with the help of participatory design. These methods may help to foster a collective approach to learning that enables people to cope with global challenges on a local level, all while valuing the traditional practices of local farmers and enriching them with scientific knowledge.
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The BMBF funded programme INTERFACES and the four regional projects, COINS, DecLaRe, InfoRange and Minodu came together at the Tropentag Conference from the 20th to 22nd of September in Berlin. Highlight was the pre-conference workshop organised by INTERFACES.
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