The Third African Congress on Conservation Agriculture (3ACCA) is coming against the backdrop of a new wave in Africa to transform agriculture to be more sustainable and climate resilient. The strategic purpose of the 3ACCA initiative is to facilitate diverse and open sharing of experiences and information on Conservation Agriculture (CA) and Sustainable Agricultural Mechanization (SAM) thereby fostering learning and widespread awareness and interest in the uptake and spread of CA and SAM. The main theme of the congress is “Building a Resilient Future in Africa through Conservation Agriculture and Sustainable Mechanization.”
The Africa Congress is jointly organized by African Conservation Tillage Network (ACT), Kingdom of Morocco, the African Union Commission, the NEPAD Agency, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the UN, INRA Morocco and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), in collaboration with the Hassan II Agronomic and Veterinary Institute (IAVH2), Moroccan Association of Conservation Agriculture (AMAC), the National School of Agriculture of Meknes (ENAM) and other classified Sponsors. It's objective is to bring together and enable experts, practitioners, and policy makers across different sectors and interest groups at all levels of agriculture development from the public, private and civil society sectors to share and exchange information and knowledge about best practices that expand the Africa-wide adoption of Conservation Agriculture (CA) and Sustainable Agricultural Mechanization (SAM) as a basis for building resilience to climate change amid the increasing food and energy prices and disruptions in distribution systems.
The diversity of expert knowledge, information, and insights as well as stakeholders that will be brought at the congress is essential to enable the desired multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral development of CA and SAM as core production components of climate-smart agriculture. This will further sustained mobilization of policy, institutional and community support to accelerate the widespread adoption and management of CA and SAM as core elements of the expanding climate-smart food and agriculture systems in Africa. This is in line with the Malabo Declaration, AU’s Agenda 2063 and the SDGs.
The 3ACCA initiative provides a platform to facilitate diverse and open sharing of experiences and information on CA and SAM thereby fostering learning and widespread awareness and interest in the uptake and spread of CA and appropriate SAM. This includes CA and SAM’s roles in: enhancing sustainable agricultural productivity, strengthening environmental and social resilience, and fostering efforts to provide food and nutrition security as well as jobs and economic opportunities, especially for rural communities, including youth and women. The 3ACCA initiative provides “neutral space” for networking, collaboration and partnership to support the scaling-up of CA systems and SAM-based technologies as the sustainable basis for CSA development across Africa.
Therefore, this congress seeks to facilitate the development of a more effective and coherent action plan geared towards;
