Realizing Inclusive SAI: Contextualizing indicators to better evaluate gender and intergenerational inequity in SAI processes and outcomes - Cases from Southern and Western Africa

Despite increasing sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI) investments, indicators for detecting gender and intergenerational inequities in SAI costs and benefits sharing often remain overgeneralized, theoretical, or locally irrelevant. We examine the relative value of, and how to, customize standard SAI indicators to detect such inequities in specific socio-cultural contexts to enhance data collection for evidence-based decision making in fostering gender/youth inclusive SAI. Using focus-group discussions and key informant interviews among farmers and diverse government, NGO, private sector, and academic stakeholders in two districts in Malawi and three in Ghana, we assess the perceived roles, differentiated needs/ priorities of men, women and youth, and the sharing of SAI burdens and benefits within farming households. We investigate what context-appropriate questions to ask, to whom, and how, to collect reliable information on indicators of SAIinvestment inequities. Results illuminate context-specific, gendered and intergenerational factors shaping access to and ownership of productive resources, household decision making, SAI participation, and appropriateness of selected indicators. Combining farmers’ and local field-expert’ perspectives offers practical insights for customizing inequity indicators. Findings highlight advantages of local contextualization of SAI indicators, including insights on appropriate data-collection approaches that challenge orthodox survey/quantitative methods for detecting and assessing gender/age inequities to foster inclusive SAI

Revisiting the Factors Shaping Outcomes for Forest and Landscape Restoration in Sub-Saharan Africa:A Way Forward for Policy, Practice and Research

A lack of systematic understanding of the elements that determine the success of forest and landscape restoration (FLR) investments leads to the inability to clearly articulate strategic and practical approaches to support natural resource restoration endeavors across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This review examines the different challenges and opportunities for effective restoration interventions. Using a structured literature review, we draw evidence from a broad range of scholarly works on natural resource conservation and governance to investigate the early dynamics of FLR in SSA. We first engage in a contextual clarification of FLR concepts and then provide a synthesis of the factors that influence the results of FLR interventions at the social and institutional level to inform relevant restoration stakeholders—policy makers, investors, and practitioners. The review finds that several interacting factors shape the outcomes of FLR interventions. We classified them into three categories based on their features, intensity, and scale of occurrence: (1) micro-scale factors that enable or limit individual engagement in FLR and sustainable management practices; (2) project/program-level factors, including the design and implementation stages; and (3) institutional, policy, and governance factors, and issues of inequity that operate at the local or national government scale. The review goes beyond underscoring funding constraints as a major challenge to the up- and out-scaling of restoration interventions and FLR success. The findings also set out a premise for future research to guide the design and implementation of successful FLR models in SSA

Limits to grain-legume technology integration by smallholder farmers: The case of time-sensitive labor demands and food security primacy in Malawi

Over the last two decades, researchers and farmers have been actively co-developing soil-amelioration technologies in Malawian maize-based smallholder systems, specifically grain-legume technologies (GLT) for the purpose of sustainable intensification. Despite farmers' expressed interest and researchers' technological adaptations to reflect newly discovered on-farm constraints, farmers' adoption of these technologies remains limited, as does researchers' understanding of associated barriers. We investigate Malawian-smallholder farmers' incorporation of co-designed GLT into their maize-based systems after four years of intentional on-farm experimentation, focusing on understanding farmers' (n = 366) continued low levels of integration. We used mixed qualitative and quantitative methods within participatory action research to examine the potential effects of farmers' stated preferences and perceptions of GLT on their adoption choices. We found that farmers' adoption of GLT continues to remain low. Farmers preferred their traditional maize-dominated system to the majority of the studied GLT, for its perceived superiority in meeting farmers' food security and yield needs. Additionally, although GLT were less labor intensive than farmers' traditional maize systems in aggregate, farmers' croppingsystem choices prioritized food security needs and were restricted by increased labor demand during timesensitive labor tasks that have the potential to impact food security by decreasing on-farm maize production, specifically the task of planting. We identify potential entry points for future research that prioritize reducing the planting complexity of GLT in maize-dominated systems