Can a combination of University College London’s ExCiteS Group’s and Mapping for Change’s tools (Sapelli, Geokey and Community Maps) and engagement methods enhance more resilient farming practices in Nigeria?
This is the question that we’re trying to answer with eCSAgri, a six-month pilot led by our colleagues at University College London in conjunction with the Nigerian Environmental and Economic Resource Centre (EERC). We’re aiming to support three small communities of Nigerian smallholder farmers in working towards a productivity-enhancing, ecosystem-friendly and climate change resilient farming system: Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA). Our main research objectives are:
- To understand the key indicators for CSA implementation and monitoring in smallholdings within the study area.
- To investigate which land use data the SHFs can capture with an appropriate use of our technology in their social and cultural context.
- To investigate how our combination of digital tools and methods can enhance collaboration and enable authorities and scientists to provide relevant and timely advice to smallholder famers.
Our role
Together with ExCiteS researchers, we will be training the EERC team in the uses, adaptability and applications our technologies. We will support our Nigerian partner in engaging the farmers and stakeholders as well as to co-design and implement the data collection. We will build Community Maps to provide meaningful visualisations of both existing datasets and newly data generated by the farmers. Finally, we will be in charge of the evaluation framework that will provide information about the project impact and success. The results of this project will pave the way for other large-scale research into mapping, visualisation and protocols for Climate Smart Agriculture across Sub-Saharan Africa.
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