About inSALSA
About
Increasing Sustainability of Agribiologicals by Living labs in sub-Saharan Africa (inSALSA) aims to enhance the use of agricultural biologicals as alternatives to hazardous agrochemicals through living labs in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Rationale:
In most African countries, agriculture is pivotal in supporting rural livelihoods. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), already the most food-insecure region globally, climate change severely impacts food security and economic growth, leading to poverty. These days, SSA faces additional challenges from food price inflation, trade disruptions, and the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, underscoring the need for regional food sovereignty. Achieving climate-resilient and sustainable agriculture requires rethinking food systems to balance increased production, economic development, environmental protection, and equitable social benefits.
Agricultural biologicals are nature-based products that can increase yield, improve soil and plant health, and manage crop pests and pathogens. They offer alternatives to conventional agrochemicals, which are known to harm the environment. Biologicals can also improve yields, soil health and crop resilience. If effectively implemented, these solutions can transform agriculture from an environmental and climate burden to a ‘solution’ to climate and environmental challenges.
Supported by Biodiversa+ “BiodivNBS Call”.
inSALSA aims to support applied research and innovation, leading to the creation of new results that can be practically applied in agriculture. This includes knowledge about biologicals as new nature-based solutions, technologies, and procedures that can promote ecologically and economically sustainable land management systems. It addresses the challenges and needs of society and the economy related to the sustainable development of the landscape and human settlements. It will contribute to generating more applied research results through international cooperation, expanding cooperation between domestic and foreign research organizations and companies, and improving access to international knowledge and know-how. The research is mainly focused on SSA, but the results can be applied in other partner countries where there are interventions in the landscape, soil compaction, use of inappropriate agrotechnical procedures, and release of chemicals into the environment.
inSALSA will establish three different types of Living Labs on two continents.
The proposed living labs will evaluate biologicals through stakeholder engagement and via dialogues around policy and value-chain creation, which can contribute to more sustainable smallholder farming in rural but also peri-urban parts of SSA.
The community-based living labs will have a heavy component of what is referred to as ‘living testbeds’, which offer a shared space in which new products, approaches, processes, and ways of working can be initiated, developed, and tested with smallholder farmers, policy makers, extension service officers, the private sector and researchers. In parallel, a capacity-building living lab located in Italy will be established where we will gather experts on the EU level and connect them to expertise in SSA to facilitate North-South learning and exchange. Apart from the capacity-building living lab in Italy, five research support sites in the Czech Republic, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Tanzania to increase the research capacity of inSALSA. Whereas the first tree will validate findings, systemise testing of indigenous knowledge for biologicals, the two latter will provide methodologies for monitoring social dynamics. Work in the living labs and two research sites will be carried out to identify biologicals for mitigating the (a)biotic stress and to identify suitable markers for monitoring the biologicals activity on plants. Based on the experience in the two community-based and the capacity-building living labs, a replication lab will be set up in Ethiopia during the last project year. This will expand the activities already done in South Africa, Kenya and Italy and contextualize it into Ethiopian conditions.
The observations from the living labs will be collated during a Design-thinking workshop for future development in the last year, where different stakeholders will get together and take different roles with a high focus on the users of the solution and their specific needs.
