I was born in a small village in southern Rwanda, where the majority of inhabitants rely on subsistence farming for their daily living. Given its far distance from the national grid, the village has no access to electricity, and biomass is the main source of fuel. As I grew up facing these challenges firsthand, I developed a passion for having a direct role in improving my livelihood and the livelihoods of my fellow villagers.
Willis Okumu highlights how young educated pastoralists are bringing a new paradigm of governance and peace building to Northern Kenya.
As unemployed young men pick through trash heaps near Jimma University in southwestern Ethiopia to find treasures to sell, they search for one of the hottest resources in demand at the moment: discarded animal bones.
In 2014, a youth-led company, CARL Group, made up of four young entrepreneurs from Rwanda had an idea: to process orange-fleshed sweet potatoes (OFSP) and turn them into baked goods. Hardworking, determined, passionate and business-minded, the company has added value by taking what was once considered a valueless crop and creating healthy, consumable vitamin A products.
In a small village in western Kenya, I had my first encounter with farming. Farming was hugely defined by women waking up early every day, with a hoe and a machete, and spending a whole day physically tilling the land. The little inherited knowledge was enough to manage farms.
This farming system worked for a long time when our forefathers had fertile land, hugely fallow with plenty of time to regenerate. Now things have changed. We are at a time when over 60 percent of Africa’s agricultural soils have degenerated, weather has become more unpredictable and the demand for food has increased. Looking at my home village, our hereditary land tenure system has resulted in fragmentation of the available land to uneconomical farm sizes. Productivity per farm has reduced, and even farmers are no longer immune to hunger.
A five-day international training progrmme for stakeholders in the Agricultural sector to “Promote Agriculture Technology to Improve Productivity and Net Returns for Smallholder Farmers” has opened in Accra.
My name is Prisca Egboluche from Nigeria. I am a MasterCard Foundation graduate scholar in the Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences at Michigan State University (MSU), in the United States. I am also an Igbo language instructor in the Department of Linguistic and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages, MSU. I am an avid researcher, a young entrepreneur and a dedicated teacher with an open mind.
The “omega-3 fatty acids fortified eggs” project, is the brain child of Dr. Jacob Alhassan Hamidu, an Animal Scientist.
The 2015 Research Report of the University said it had received 112,000.00 Canadian dollars funding under the “Stars in Global Health” programme, which supports bold ideas and high impact innovations by scientists in both low and middle income countries.
It indicated that outside Africa, people “consume omega 3 eggs and products but this comes at a high cost”.
The university’s lead researcher, it said “seeks to find ways to make it more affordable and accessible” to children not only in the country but the rest of the continent.
The report underlined that “flax oil and flax seed contain high levels of omega 3, which is essential for brain development and helps reduce cardiovascular diseases inadults”.
It was with this in mind that that, Dr. Hamidu decided to focus on children, convinced that “if we could dispense omega 3 through eggs compared to the practice of giving pills as nutrition intervention, we could increase its acceptability among rural people”.
“The designer eggs would then be more acceptable; and accessibility and consumption would be increased since children love eggs”, it added.
The average Ghanaian is estimated to consume between 12 and 18 eggs in a year
and this needs to radically increase, considering the enormous nutritional benefits of eggs – a very good source of inexpensive, high quality protein.
A unanimous decision on how to take action on climate change is incredibly rare. Yet, African nations have overwhelmingly included climate resilient agriculture in their indicative pledges to the United Nations. And agriculture is seen as a major focus through a common position of the African Union on climate adaptation.
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