Projects
Developing effective land health surveillance methods
The organization’s research advances in land health surveillance are based on principles adapted from public health surveillance, where accurate measuring and monitoring of changes and improvements in the health of populations is closely integrated with statistical methods to form a basis for policy development, priority setting and management. The initiative aims at understanding how land health surveillance systems deploy modern science and technology to strengthen evidence-based decision-making on land and agroforestry management to help better understand hazardous and protective factors affecting land health risk.
Assessing land health risks and targeting agroforestry interventions to reduce and reverse land degradation
Through application of the land health surveillance methods, the project aims to determine the main environmental and behavioral risk factors associated with land and soil degradation syndromes in the tropics, and how they are distributed in relation to different settings and factors such as ecoregions and poverty levels. It also seeks to explore the types of agroforestry interventions which can help reduce or reverse key risk factors associated with land degradation and what the cost efficiencies of alternative preventative and rehabilitation interventions under different circumstances.
Soil micronutrients Africa
Annually, over 50 percent of all human deaths on earth are associated with malnutrition, mostly occurring in the developing countries. Building healthy soils is a foundation for healthy plants, healthy livestock and healthy people.
"The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in partnership with MTT (AgriFood Research Finland) and the University of Nairobi have stated a new project to establish a soil micronutrient surveillance system for Sub-Sharan Africa and build Africa capacity in new diagnostic analytical methods. The project is part of FoodAfrica - a research and development Programme enhancing food security in West and East Africa, coordinated by MTT.
Efforts to diagnose, survey and manage soil nutrient deficiencies in Sub-Saharan Africa have been insufficient due the inadequacy of human and laboratory capacity and a lack of cost-effective diagnostic methods that can be applied over large land areas. The project will deploy new infrared and x-ray technology to provide low cost analytical methods for assessing soil micronutrients. It will also draw on a unique set of soil and crop samples being generated by the Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS), coupled with the long history of expertise in soil micronutrient analysis at MTT in Finland. The University of Nairobi is helping to build capacity of young scientists in the new approaches.
The end users of results will include farmer groups, public and private extension services, local natural resource planners, project managers, fertilizer companies, national research scientists, national policy makers and planners, and international development organizations."
