AgrAbility for Africa

Many obstacles remain across Africa to achieve equality, inclusion, and justice for everyone faced with disability, and although legislation exists for the purpose, it is seldom enforced, and many laws are obsolete today.

The capacity to speak out and write to promote, protect, and defend the rights of people with disability is important in order to reverse a situation that was comparable to the state of affairs in the United States of America before the passing of the American Disability Act (ADA). In order to learn from the experiences, process, and the achievements of the ADA, Mutumba Faisal is currently enrolled in an online training on disability advocacy run by Professor Rob Engel at American University. Mutumba is representing AgrAbility for Africa as a means of empowering the organization in strengthening community awareness and action on inclusion, through policy and direct participation, to ensure that all people with disabilities across Africa have equal opportunity to be economically self-sufficient and to earn and save with appropriate accommodations and support.

About 90% of farming across Africa is rain fed, and climate change is happening. Lack of understanding of the changes in weather patterns by many farmers inevitably attracts a lot of theories and superstitions. During outreach missions, the AgrAbility for Africa staff are increasingly faced with questions and theories about the state of the situation. Because of wide-spread misunderstanding, expanding and sharing knowledge about climate-smart agriculture has become critical to what the organization does in order to enhance agricultural productivity and smallholder incomes while contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

To achieve the above, AgrAbility for Africa is actively researching solutions and partners in order to better respond to these challenges and further support implementation of appropriate climate smart agricultural (CSA) practices to help transform agri-food systems towards green and climate-resilient practices when managing landscapes, including cropland, livestock, and fisheries across Africa.

Submitted by Mutumba Faisal