By ‘Wole Fatunbi
At the 13th Plenary Session of the Global Soil Platform (GSP) held at the FAO campus in Rome, Italy, 3rd – 5th June 2025.
The plenary on soil health featured a key presentation by Christian Witt and Paul Luu of the BMGF and the 4per 1000 initiative; their presentations highlighted the importance of soil health notation for managing soils globally. The BMGF accentuated the importance of the soil information system and the effort and support the foundation provides at the country and continental level in Africa.
In his intervention, Prof. ‘Wole Fatunbi, the Ag. Director of Research and Innovation at the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), emphasized the need to tie all efforts on managing the soils in Africa to the continental efforts that reside in the Soil Initiative for Africa (SIA) and the Africa Fertilizer and Soil health Action Plan (AFSH-AP), the AFSH-AP is the 10 years implementation framework for the SIA. He indicated the importance of the Soil information to achieve the goals of SIA and soil health ambitions. The African president set an ambitious goal of restoring 30% of the degraded lands in Africa to a healthy soil status in 10 years. The current challenge is what is a “Healthy Soil” and what indicators should be measured, what are the thresholds of these different indicators, and what index will help define a healthy soil. While efforts are going on the continent to have the indicators, the cooperation of all stakeholders are essential.
On stimulating the right action, Prof Wole emphasized the need for broad-based communication efforts, especially those that touches the last mile with the soil users, “apparently, they are the ones to ensure their production asset is truly healthy”. In principle, the Africa Soil Information System must be robust enough to provide easily accessible advisory services to the users.
The need to effectively engage all stakeholders within and outside Africa in this drive is vital to achieve the ambition of African leaders in managing the African soil. This is reposed in the SIA and AFSH-AP.
For more information on the SIA check; https://sia.faraafrica.org
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