Land, Soil and Crop Information Services to support Climate-Smart Agriculture - Project closing event

On 28 October 2025, the project Land, Soil and Crop Information Services to support Climate-Smart Agriculture held its closing event in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, bringing together partners to present key results and lessons learned from its five years of implementation in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda.

Co-funded by the European Union’s Development Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture (DeSIRA) program, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and ISRIC.

The initiative focused on strengthening national agricultural knowledge and innovation systems by developing sustainable Land, Soil, and Crop Information Hubs (LSC Hubs) within national research organisations. These hubs consolidate and connect existing datasets and information sources, offering open-access tools and data to support evidence-based agricultural decision making.

These hubs consolidate and connect existing datasets and information sources, offering open-access tools and data to support evidence-based agricultural decision making.

This five-year initiative has successfully built and embedded data integration hubs for land, soil, and crop information within three national agricultural research organisations - Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization ( KALRO) and Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board (RAB) across three partner countries.

The project achieved key outcomes:

• Hub establishment: Deployed integrated Land Soil Crop information Hubs to centralise and standardise fragmented research data.

• Capacity strength: Provided specialised training, fully equipping local staff to independently manage and sustain these sophisticated data platforms.

• User impact: Engaged and trained end-users, including local farmers, to apply the data for adopting climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and improving sustainable land management.

The LSC Hubs are designed to serve agricultural stakeholders at national, regional, and local level by providing integrated information to support climate-smart agricultural practices, promote rural transformation, and strengthen food system resilience.

The project is implemented by a consortium led by Wageningen University & Research (WUR), in collaboration with ISRIC, International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO), Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board (RAB), World Agroforestry (ICRAF), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).