GALILEO Project
The School of Agriculture has successfully secured a four – year European Union (EU) Horizon grant known as Strengthening rural Livelihoods and resilience to climate change in Africa: innovative agroforestry integrating people, trees, crops and livestock – GALILEO. This project took off in January, 2025 and will end in January, 2029. Under this project, school of Agriculture is training three (3) PhD students. Prof. Irene S. Egyir is the Principal Investigator (PI) together with collaborators such as Prof. Eric Nartey (Dean, School of Agriculture), Prof. Daniel Adu Ankrah, Prof. Seloame Tatu Nyaku, Prof. Richard Osei-Amponsah, Prof. Daniel Etsey Dodor, Prof. Dilys Sefakor MacCarthy and Prof. Ken Okwae Fening.
The overall objective of GALILEO is to co-develop, via multi-actor partnerships, context-specific, people centered agroforestry innovations in diverse agro-pastoral (AP), agroforestry (AF) and agro-silvo-pastoral (ASP) systems (simply called AFSPs) that increase agricultural, household and climate change adaptation and mitigation in SSA. Following a genuine multi-actor approach, we build upon 8 agroforestry Living Labs (LLs: local scale and actors) and 4 national and 1 regional Innovation Platforms (IPs: national to international scale and actors), set up across 4 AU countries in SSA. With a special focus to extend productivity and incomes in dry seasons and sustain them under (climatic) drought, our LLs are set in semi-arid zones of Senegal (SN) and Kenya (KN) and normally humid but drought-prone zones of Ghana (GH) and Cameroon (CR), in a balanced way while comparing and covering a large range of African conditions. LLs will engage and enable farmers/pastoralists to co-create, test and benefit from context-specific agroforestry management innovations, to address climate change impact on farm and livestock productivity, to diversify income from agroforestry products and new value chains, to benefit from carbon farming and payment for ecosystem services and to preserve biodiversity. We do this with interdisciplinary research providing qualitative and quantitative data of the biophysical, socio-economic and environmental performance of agroforestry. In parallel, we engage in solid multi-actor collaborations and policy dialogues through our IPs to co-create realistic and adoptable scenarios of adaptive transformation, guidelines, and policy recommendations, helping towards strengthening their local innovation ecosystems, under a favourable institutional and policy framework.
GALILEO has twenty-four (24) consortium members drawn from the Centre De Cooperation Internationale En Recherche Agronomique Pour Ledeveloppement - CIRAD (France)., Q-PLAN International Advisors PC, Institut De Recherche Pour Le Developpement (France),Institut National de Recherche Pour L'agriculture L'alimentation et L'environnement (France), Universita Degli Studi Della Basilicata (Italy), Wageningen University (Netherlands), Kobenhavns Universitet (Denmark), Nitidae (France), Max Havelaar France Association (France), Terre Verte (France), Institut Senegalais De Recherches (Senegal), Agricoles (Senegal), Centre De Suivi Ecologique (Senegal), Conseil National De Concertation Et De Cooperation Des Ruraux Association (Senegal), Jardins D'afrique De mbour (Senegal), University of Embu (Kenya), The International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology Ibg (Kenya), Farm Africa Limited (United Kingdom), University of Ghana (Ghana), Kuapa Kokoo Cooperative Cocoa Farmers and Marketing Union Limited (Ghana), Nature Conservation Research Centre – Ghana (NCRC) LBG (Ghana), International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (Nigeria), Institut De Recherche Agricole Pour Le Developpement (Cameroun), Association Green Development Advocates (Cameroun), Forschungsinstitut Fur Biologischen Landbau Stiftung.
