Accra, Ghana – Abbe Agricultural Transformation Partners Inc. (AbbeLabs), the African organisation founded to drive agricultural transformation across the continent, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC), the world’s reference center for soil information. The agreement establishes a long-term partnership on soil information and its practical applications from soil fertility advice to land degradation assessment.
The MoU was signed by Dr. Oumou M. Camara, Founder and CEO of AbbeLabs, and Rik van den Bosch, Director of ISRIC, for an initial term of three years, renewable by mutual consent.
The partnership pairs ISRIC’s globally recognised soil science with AbbeLabs’ operational understanding of African agricultural systems, and marks one of the first major international collaborations AbbeLabs has brought to the table since its founding. It reflects a shared conviction that more productive, resilient and sustainable agriculture in Africa must be built on quality-assessed evidence about the continent’s own soils.
Under the agreement, AbbeLabs and ISRIC will work together to:
- Identify and develop joint programmes on soil health and mobilize the resources to implement them.
- Provide technical support for the development of soil information systems and data governance in line with international standards.
- Co-develop decision-support systems tailored to local soil fertility contexts.
- Promote sustainable and climate-resilient agricultural practices.
- Deliver training, knowledge-exchange and institutional strengthening in soil science, soil data management and digital soil mapping.
- Foster scientific exchange on findings, theories and methodologies related to soil information systems.
“Africa cannot transform its agriculture on borrowed assumptions about its own soils. This partnership with ISRIC gives us something far more valuable — quality-assessed evidence, and the capacity to turn it into advice a farmer can act on,” said Dr. Oumou M. Camara, Founder and CEO of AbbeLabs. “AbbeLabs was built to connect world-class science to African realities. By combining ISRIC’s global expertise in soils with our understanding of African contexts, we will create new opportunities to strengthen agricultural productivity, climate resilience and food security. This is the model for the partnerships we intend to build.”
“For ISRIC, this partnership represents an opportunity to strengthen the impact of soil information on agricultural development in Africa by bringing scientific knowledge closer to the needs of end users, institutions, and rural communities,” said Rik van den Bosch, Director of ISRIC.
Both organizations share the view that healthy soils are the foundation of sustainable food systems and sound management of natural resources.
