INTERFACES closes out a season of validation, dialogue and synthesis, bringing four years of research on sustainable land management in Africa back to the actors it concerns.
Closing workshops in Ghana and Benin, a high-level stage in Nigeria, a side event at UNCCD COP17 in Mongolia and, most recently, the final workshop at Tropentag in Göttingen: INTERFACES, a consortium of Bonn-based research organisations including IDOS, and associated regional projects have spent the past months engaging with various actors across the BMFTR-funded Sub-Saharan Africa’s Sustainable Land Management Programme.
Closing Workshops in Ghana and Benin
The DecLaRe and COINS projects brought policymakers, researchers, practitioners, extension actors, civil society and farmers together to review research outputs and ask how evidence could inform local decision-making more effectively. Among the platforms, feeding into this process is the Participatory Learning Platform in northern Ghana, established in 2023 with some 25 stakeholders and crucial support from INTERFACES. Through joint reflective learning, it helped build a theory of change acceptable by all stakeholders, shift how gender is addressed in local development planning, and is now being put forward as a model for replication elsewhere. In Benin, regional stakeholders were updated on findings and follow-up options including the decision support system developed by DecLaRe.
9th African Agricultural Science Week (AASW)
At AASW in Abuja/Nigeria, INTERFACES held a slot in a high-level session on Knowledge, Learning and Innovation Systems for Agrifood Transformation, alongside a shorter contribution at the 4th Biennial Climate Smart Agriculture Stakeholder Workshop. Anchored in AASW’s sub-theme on emerging agricultural technologies, the session pushed back against a narrow reading of knowledge management as repositories and dissemination products. Instead, the session framed it as a strategic enabler of adaptive learning and evidence-informed scaling, grounded in concrete examples of institutional uptake from national, regional and continental practice.
UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar/Mongolia
As part of INTERFACES, IDOS co-organised the side event ‚From Research to Reality‘ with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA). Across the three rounds — design, approaches and impact — the panel returned to a shared concern: Knowledge products alone rarely sustain impact. It is the ongoing relationships between researchers, policymakers and communities that keep evidence usable over time.
Tropentag 2026
In Göttingen, Germany, the pre-conference workshop “From Research to Results” closed a multi-year series of workshops accompanying the programme. The series shifted the focus from methods, over communicating findings, to science-policy interfaces.
The programme’s draft knowledge synthesis was presented. It traced how the five projects jointly sought to answer the question of improving local livelihoods through local research, against the overarching goals of the BMFTR call: resource-efficient, digitally supported land management; forecasting and knowledge exchange across governance levels; and participatorily developed measures transferred into partner-country capacity building.
DLR-PT, on behalf of the German Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), as well as the Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE), joined the discussion.
The activities of the accompanying project INTERFACES and the four regional projects, COINS, DecLaRe, InfoRange and Minodu are funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) as part of the platform strategy Research for Sustainability (FONA). Further information on the projects can be found on our website and on the FONA-Website.
