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GALA blog

An insight into the development of the GALA project.

How comics, pop music and drama deliver down-to-earth messages to help African farmers improve their soil

5 December is World Soil Day. Soil is a life source for healthy ecosystems, healthy food and, ultimately, healthy humans. With a growing population, the soil that’s cultivated will have to feed many more people, but it will only be able to do this if soil fertility is managed. This year’s World Soil Day theme […]

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Communicating knowledge to make lasting change and improve livelihoods

CABI’s unique expertise and global presence around the world allows us to communicate the agricultural knowledge that smallholders need to make lasting change and improve their livelihoods The challenge Knowledge and information can help address global challenges like hunger and poverty, but a disconnect often exists between the solutions to global problems and the millions […]

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Village-based film screenings prove a popular way to reach and inform farming families in Northern Ghana

Duncan Sones, from the CABI GALA communications team, reflects on the first two years of the soybean campaign in Northern Ghana. In the last two years, there have been 346 village-based film screenings of films made by CABI to show farmers how to grow soybean. Take into account the use of Facebook for a music-based […]

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CABI and IFDC join forces to get soybean film out to farmers in Northern Ghana

Woman and child at film screening By Duncan Sones Farmers in Northern Ghana are reaping the benefit of village-based film screenings to inform them about agricultural practices. Film screenings are growing in popularity amongst farmers and extension projects, as the technique for sharing information. This is because they are a very inclusive way of sharing […]

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Soybean Innovation Lab and CABI explore a stepwise investment approach using technology bundles

Duncan Sones of CABI-led Africa Soil Health Consortium project explains what has been going on in Northern Ghana. The book Nudge explains the authors’ Nobel Prize-winning idea to adapt policy approaches to encourage people to make decisions that are in their broad self-interest. It’s not about penalizing people financially if they don’t act in certain […]

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Early lessons from GALA on messages and channel selection

Silvia Silvestri reflects on the lessons emerging from the Gender and the Legume Alliance project. The GALA project is designed to support small-scale farming households to improving their capacity to access and use information and knowledge, to achieve sustainable legume intensification. The scale-up work in Ghana and Tanzania will leave a valuable legacy amongst small-scale […]

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10 steps to sustainable business models for smallholder farmer market development programs …

By: Edward Baars, Silvia Silvestri and Duncan Sones An honest assessment of the supply chains for improved legume inputs shows that holistic solutions are needed. The move to sustainable business models, however, will mean that many flaws need to be addressed. In some cases, what looks like the solution is just reframing the problem. But […]

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Family-centric cinema: a Q&A on changing the conversation for women in agriculture

First published in the CABI blog. Women need first-hand information and knowledge about new agricultural technologies to have a say on how family farms are run, according to Dannie Romney, Global Director, Development, Communication and Extension, CABI. Dannie is currently Project Executive for the Africa Soil Health Consortium (ASHC) and Gender and the Legume Alliance(GALA) […]

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Multi-media campaign helps improve food security in Tanzania

First published in the CABI website.  A multi-media campaign has helped CABI and partner agencies in Tanzania improve food security in Tanzania by encouraging thousands of farmers to adopt improved legume technologies including ways to produce healthier and more profitable crops of common bean and soybean. The collaborative project led by FRI, CABI and AFAP, […]

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Linking farmers with providers of inputs for sustainable production

First published on the SAIRLA website on 03 January, 2018 With a large crowd gathered, the screening then switched to the serious business of ‘Growing Soybeans’ and the crowd hushed. This was one of hundreds of screenings by Countrywise-Ghana to inform farming communities of good agricultural practices for soybean production. Countrywise-Ghana produce and distribute videos […]

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