The Executive Director of the Africa Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services has called on African countries to urgently embrace partnerships to enhance food and nutrition security.
In an interview with nbc News, Dr. Silim Nahdy stressed that partnerships between countries and agricultural entities are key for Africa's agricultural landscape.
The agriculture sector in Africa faces both immense challenges and unprecedented opportunities that jeopardise its food systems.
Africa boasts approximately 25% of the world's arable land but contributes merely more than 10% to global agricultural output.
The continent therefore needs to partner to devise solutions that will allow the sector to increase its output.
"So African Union and Africa Development Bank, CGIAR, and AARIEIs have decided to work together in a more coherent way and operation at a national level in a coherent way where we are in synergies so that technology and capacity are challenged in a way to reach the last mile that is really at the farm level and other different level," he said.
Dr. Nahdy is optimistic that the partnership will strengthen and bring on board stakeholders' expertise to drive transformative change in Africa's agricultural landscape.
Leveraging scientific research, innovation, and education to create resilient, productive, and sustainable agricultural systems across the continent is another.
"One of them is an organisational coordinated mechanism, which is already being done, and the other area is working on the science of gender, which really states what should be done and where and when, which is a continental science agenda and developing four sides basically, that is to say, there is climate change. Now we have to think ahead of the measures and partnerships to address the issues, and the other one is scaling approaches and monitoring impacts to see the interventions of the impacts as we move along; those are the main ones."
He also called on African countries to embrace climate-smart agriculture if they want to see food insecurity, malnutrition, and poverty reduced and farmers' livelihoods improved.