Concepts and Objectives

The transition to sustainable food systems is crucial for ensuring global food security, mitigating climate change, and reducing agriculture’s environmental impact. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where a large portion of the population relies on agroforestry for their livelihoods, agricultural productivity remains low, and climate change exacerbates food insecurity. Extreme weather events, prolonged dry seasons, and environmental degradation are driving migration and expansion into marginal lands, further threatening forests and ecosystems. Sustainable agroforestry management solutions are urgently needed to support food security, protect natural resources, and ensure long-term resilience.

The overall objective of GALILEO is to rely on genuine Multi-Actor Approaches (MAA) to co-develop context-specific, people-centered agroforestry innovations in representative agro-pastoral, agroforestry, and agro-silvo-pastoral systems (AFSPs) from Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We build upon 8 agroforestry Living Labs (LLs: local scale and actors), 4 national and 1 regional Innovation Platforms (IPs), set up across 4 AU SSA countries. Our LLs are set in semi-arid zones of Senegal and Kenya and normally humid but drought-prone zones of Ghana and Cameroon thus comparing and covering a large range of SSA conditions. Through MMA, we co-construct potentially adoptable scenarios ex-ante with Innovator, Target, and Control actors in our LLs, then implement, assess, and compare performances in their pilot plots during the whole project. We use field observations also to calibrate process models, able to simulate under future CC scenarios. After full multi-criteria and trade-off analysis, we finally coselect the most effective scenarios ex-post. We thus rely on transdisciplinary research, providing qualitative and quantitative data on the biophysical, socio-economic, and environmental performances. Such adoptable agroforestry innovations will also enable farmers/pastoralists and stakeholders to diversify their incomes from new agroforestry value chains, of which 2 are GALILEO-original. They will also benefit from carbon farming and payment for ecosystem services opportunities. Through our IPs, we also engage in solid MAA collaborations and policy dialogues to first identify bottlenecks and second elaborate guidelines, and policy recommendations, helping towards strengthening their local innovation ecosystems, under a favorable institutional and policy framework.

The Key objectives of the project are:

  • Engage multi-actor local, national and regional communities to co-create and implement sustainable agroforestry management solutions for AFSPs resilient to climate change and drought.

  • Test, demonstrate and build capacity on innovative AFSPs management practices and evaluate effects on sustainable income generation and diversification in diverse contexts across SSA.

  • Assess the potential of AFSPs management to climate change adaptation, mitigation and biodiversity enhancement and offer qualitative and quantitative open data.

  • Evaluate AFSPs under various CC scenarios and apply multi-criteria and multi-scale assessment to co-select AFSPs ex-post.

  • Strengthen agroforestry innovation ecosystem in SSA and beyond, leveraging knowledge exchange, policy dialogues and coordination with key networks for dissemination, exploitation and replication.

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