01 Jun 2025

Climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, and environmental degradation are no longer distant threats to the livelihoods of vulnerable people but daily realities for millions of the people across the continent.

BIUST deputy Vice Chancellor, Professor Abraham Ogwu said when officially launching a project that aims to strengthen climate resilience through integrating low-cost technologies in a women farmer led agroecology and ethnoveterinary approaches.

The project is a collaboration across BIUST and South African universities; University of Venda, University of Pretoria as well as  Conventry University in the United Kingdom. Other partners are  the  Nambu Group (insect protein private sector company), local seed company and the livestock farmers (as technology co-creators and users).

Prof. Ogwu said the world faced a convergence of urgent and yet interconnected challenges while the global human population had grown exponentially from one million to 7.8 billion over the past 10 000 years and was expected to reach 10.4 billion by 2080. The challenges, he said, offered a unique opportunity for innovations on systemic transformation in how food was produced, ecosystems are managed, and how livelihoods sustainability were supported.

He said while global food productivity must increase by 70 per cent to feed an additional 2.5 billion people by 2050, and simultaneously closing the inequality gaps, in Africa this equated to 300 per cent increase in productivity. Prof. Ogwu further highlighted that the trend was putting increasing pressure on the earth’s natural resources, necessitating for an increased narrative on sustainable intensification and systems that balance increased production of food resources and sustainability.

Climate change, he said, was accelerating threatening ecosystems, agricultural productivity, animal and human health and smallholder livelihoods while biodiversity loss was reducing the resilience and integrity of the food systems. Simultaneously, he said, food insecurity, land degradation, and unsustainable resource use were deepening social and environmental inequalities, especially for smallholder farmers and women who lacked key resources to respond to challenges and as such, it was critical that the challenge were addressed in a sustainable way.

“Livestock is central to livelihoods, nutrition, and economies in the tropics and in Botswana it contributes 80 per cent of the agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and yet this sector is both vulnerable to these global challenges/shocks and is a contributor to environmental stress,” he said.

Thus, he said, initiatives and projects such as CLIPS-Africa, using innovations such as agroecology and insect protein nutrition, were an opportunity to reimagine livestock systems that were more resilient, equitable and sustainable.

“These crises are not isolated, they are systemic, and they demand integrated, transformative solutions rooted in both science and local knowledge. They require transforming food systems to work with nature, not against it,’’ he said.

He appreciated that the project aimed not just to innovate in isolation, but to co-create pathways toward livestock systems that were productive, climate-resilient, ecologically sound, and socially just, taking cognizance of women representation. ENDS