Indigenous knowledge (IK) can act as a powerful tool in a learning environment to teach students. Conventional curricula, and achievement tests in many countries, however, do not support students' learning based on their IK. Learning environments need to be adapted to help students build on...

The primary objective of this article is to present nugormesese as an indigenous mechanism of social capital in Buem-Kator, a farming community on the Ghana side of the Ghana-Togo border area. The concept of social capital will be minimally defined to refer to the capability of social norms and...

In 2004, nine country programs involved in PROLINNOVA (Promoting Local Innovation in ecologically-oriented agriculture and natural resource management) considered how local innovation could be enhanced. The PROLINNOVA partners (national NGOs and government institutions of research, extension and...

Indigenous knowledge (IK) is usually shared among local communities and transferred from one generation to the next, through oral traditions and story-telling. The IK distance learning course was an effort to facilitate this process across four countries and two continents. Information...

Ayurveda and other traditional systems of health care have been used for over two thousand years in Sri Lanka. Indigenous systems such as Ayurveda are based on the country's cultural, social, economic, and religious characteristics. In addition, Sri Lankans utilizing knowledge of these...

For a long time, HIV/AIDS was viewed as purely a health issue. Yet HIV/AIDS has implications that reach far beyond health - including great impact on agricultural and food production systems. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), most infected people live in rural areas and HIV/AIDS has become mostly a...

Pastoralists' indigenous knowledge (IK) about ecology and social organization led to rangeland-management strategies appropriate to deal with the erratic rainfall in African drylands. Herd mobility was traditionally practiced as the key strategy to make use of the scattered rangeland resources...

More than 90 percent of the population in the Sahel lives on agriculture. The fact that crop production has not kept up with population growth during the last two decades is attributed to land degradation and productivity decline resulting in increased levels of rural poverty, food shortages and...

Prior to the 1970s, parish farmers predominantly produced traditional vegetable crops for home consumption. At that time local farmers did not produce exotic vegetables, such as cabbages, carrots, lettuce, etc. which were produced on plantations and mainly consumed by the European and Asian...

Exporting deciduous fruit from the Western Cape Province of South Africa to markets in Europe, North America and Asia contributes significantly to the province's Gross Domestic Product. The main export producers are large-scale farmers. Even with the change in discriminatory legislation and...