Director, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Systems, Mrs Omolara Abimbola Oguntuyi, spoke on behalf of the Honourable Minister of Agriculture, Senator Abubakar Kyari, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

She highlighted that these projects align closely with the Ministry’s priorities, particularly in promoting sustainable agricultural practices among women farmers in Nigeria, who are mostly into subsistence farming. Therefore, they need support to transition to agroecology practices through affordable, easy-to-implement solutions.

“Since its development, the living lab has been a site for capacity building, research site, and most importantly, where economically viable approaches to food insecurity are developed and tested.”  Blessing Sorinola, Communication specialist at Apodissi, the partner in charge of the project’s communication activities, stated.

During a presentation on the  INCiTiS-FOOD project. A project that promotes best-fit agri-food technologies in Africa.

Dr Oyebola Olusegun, a senior lecturer at the Department of Aquaculture & Fisheries Management at the University of Ibadan and a member of the project consortuim, highlighted how the project is addressing food security through its living labs in Ibadan by promoting circular Agri-food technologies, cascade funding opportunities, co-creation activities, healthy food production, and fertiliser production.

The project’s commercialised produce includes a simplified, low-energy pump aquaponic set up such as the waste water from fish tanks that is drained to the sump with a low-energy water pump that lifts the waste water to the plants’ grow beds of the aquaponic system, and solid waste, which accumulates Inside the blue digester tank collected as sludge for fertilizer production. Zero-pump manual aquaponic Iteration attached to sawdust-bag yam/tuber crop production unit, and Liquid fish wastewater for uptake by crop farmers from the stagnant Renewal fish production, amongst others.

The PrAEctiCe decision support tool will be developed in the form of three applications and is currently at TRL 7, aiming at TRL 8 by Q1 of 2026.

“The project has installed a monitoring system at all three living labs. These systems will provide real-time data monitoring and analysis of key parameters such as water quality, soil conditions, and crop health, which will serve as the basis for a decision support tool for farmers and their Integrated Aqua-Agriculture farms. ”  Margherita Trestini stated during her presentation on the PrAEctiCe decision support tool.

A semi-autonomous photovoltaic (PV) system was implemented to supply power to the entire Living Labs, addressing socio-economic challenges in the East African region, and a membrane bioreactor was installed to monitor critical water and soil parameters, which give real-time monitoring and analysis feeding into the Decision Support Tool (DST) that will be useful for farmers, advisors and data scientists. She added. 

These collaborative efforts between both projects demonstrate the tangible potential of Horizon Europe initiatives in driving Africa’s agricultural transformation and encourage a more sustainable, inclusive, and innovation-driven future for food systems in Africa.

The workshop was concluded with an information sharing session on Horizon Europe Africa III Initiative, specifically for the Call for Proposals under the Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture & Environment Cluster, allowing participants to discuss potential collaborations.