Canada, Australia unveil projects to improve food security, empower women farmers in Africa

Australia and Canada in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation unveiled new projects on May 20 under two agricultural program. The projects are intended to develop food and nutrition security across Africa and empower women smallholder farmers.

The projects under the Cultivate Africa's Future Fund (CultiAF) and the Livestock Vaccine Innovation Fund (LVIF) seek to build the capacity of stakeholders to generate practical solutions.

Lisa Stadelbauer, Canada's High Commissioner to Kenya said during the CultiAF inception workshop in Nairobi that the LVIF will support the development, production, and commercialization of innovative vaccines against priority livestock diseases in sub-Saharan Africa, as reported by Xinhua.

Stadelbauer said that the portfolio of LVIF projects will focus primarily on empowering women in the livestock vaccine value chain. She further said that the main objective of CultiAF is to improve food and nutrition security in eastern and southern Africa by funding applied research to develop and scale up sustainable, climate resilient and gender responsive innovations for smallholder producers.

Alison Chartres, Australia's High Commissioner to Kenya, said that with the global population is expected to rise to nine billion by 2050, agricultural partnerships and developments like CultiAF are essential for food security to feed this growing population.

Chartres said that Africa and Australia share similar environmental constraints, such as poor soils and climatic variability. According to her, Australia has also met challenges to food security, including poor livestock nutrition, weak adoption of new technologies and low levels of farmer value-chain participation.

"As a result, Australian expertise and research are highly relevant to Africa, which makes Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research uniquely placed to broker partnerships between Australian and international research institutes and their African counterparts," Chartres opined, Xinhua noted.

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