The workshop presented the programme "Sustainable Land Management in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)" funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the strategy of its platform Research for Sustainability (Forschung für Nachhaltigkeit, FONA). This programme will be active over the next 4 years and has chosen Tropentag as a central platform for the presentation of results and furthermore for more general discussion of topics and research strategies. Agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa faces significant challenges. Many soils are degraded, yields are low, and support from government institutions is weak. Extreme weather events such as droughts and heavy rains, partly as a result of climate change, also threaten crops and soils, and finally socio-economic development.

To meet these challenges, sustainable land management is key. Four regional research and development projects (COINS, DeClaRe, InfoRange, Minodu) and the accompanying INTERFACES project have been selected by the BMBF to contribute to this endeavour. The knowledge gained together with regional partners from science, administration, politics and industry is to be directly incorporated into local support measures, training and further education measures.

In addition to the presentation of the programme by the coordination unit of Deutsches Zentrum für Luftund Raumfahrt (DLR) and by BMBF, as well as presentation of the individual projects, we see this proposed side-event as a start for discussions on research strategies in and with SSA in the fields of agriculture, rural development, natural resource protection and food security. We discussed experiences under which conditions (from funding and administrative settings over partnerships to dissemination) research is most successful in providing innovations for sustainable land use in SSA.

The main goals of the workshop was to network, share information and to start strategy discussions at future Tropentage. Participation at the workshop was open to all Tropentag participants and geared towards PhDs, senior researchers, policy makers/administrators of agricultural science support policies and users of such research.

For further information please contact INTERFACES’s Science Communication Advisor, Aiveen Donnelly.