Soil health across the rural-urban nexus in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Abstract:

Around the world, but especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, unprecedented urban growth is placing enormous burdens on governments by the growing demand for infrastructure, services, and basic needs such as housing, water, sanitation, and food security. As a consequence, informal settlements, unplanned urban zones and peri-urban are growing rapidly and their underserved communities have limited access to potable water or municipal sanitation services and suffer from chronic food insecurity. At the same time, rural outmigration is driven by a decreasing ability to maintain a satisfactory and sustainable livelihood in rural areas. Although a complex issue driven by many factors, the degradation of soils and loss of soil health through nutrient mining plays a major role in this phenomenon. African farmers, hindered by a lack of financial capital, are unable to apply soil amendments and fertilizers at the rates necessary to maintain soil health, agricultural productivity, and hence their livelihoods, forcing them to search for economic opportunity elsewhere.

I will present recent work conducted in in four different city region food systems across Sub-Saharan Africa (Arba Minch, Ethiopia, Kigali, Rwanda, Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Msunduzi, South Africa) to link soil health to waste reduction in order to improve both rural and urban livelihoods by catalyzing a circular economy based on carbon and nutrient transfers from the rural to the urban and back to the rural parts of city region food systems. I will outline how critical to this goal is the establishment of a vibrant and inclusive transdisciplinary innovation platform based on local stakeholders in each of the city regions.