The building of a pan-African soil information system for soil health monitoring

16 June 2025

The Soils4Africa project, funded by the European Union under the Horizon2020 Programme, was designed to build an open-access Soil Information System (SIS) for Africa to monitor soil quality across agricultural lands in Africa.

The idea is to create a baseline dataset and a set of standard methodologies and protocols that would allow for repeated soil quality monitoring. A key aspect of this initiative is the field campaign, which IITA–CGIAR coordinated under the leadership of Dr Jeroen Huising and Dr Samuel Mesele.

This continent-wide field campaign involves the development of protocols, electronic data recording forms, and standard operating procedures for data collection and sample processing from 20,000 sampling sites across the continent. Also included is the development of the human capacity to utilize all the tools developed so that future field campaigns can be conducted autonomously or with little external support.

During the recent project closure and handing over of the SIS to the African Union, the State Minister of Agriculture, H.E. Prof Eyasu Elias, commended IITA for the effective coordination of the field campaign and the various capacity programs coordinated for the field teams across the 33 African countries. He gave special recognition to Dr Samuel Mesele for his resilience, leadership, and coordination of the various field teams across Africa.

The role of IITA was imperative in the success of the Soils4Africa project. At the SIS launch during the major outputs and lessons learned session, Dr Mesele highlighted the various outputs of the Soils4Africa field campaign, including:

 

• Development of eight protocols and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in English, French, Arabic, and Portuguese.
• Creation of over 30 audio-visual training materials available online.
• Organized and facilitated 16 in-person workshops and over 20 online sessions.
• Trained more than 359 professionals, including scientists and agronomists, in soil inventory using new digital tools.
• The 359 professionals trained have now trained over 2000 others in African soil inventory.
• Completed training for 138 national institutes across 44 countries.
• Launched and completed field campaigns in 33 African countries
• Assessed over 16,000 sampling points, collecting 28,000 samples and 43 key field parameters.

The SIS is a key deliverable resulting from five years of dedicated collaboration between African and European partners. The Soils4Africa project will form the base material among other legacy data sources to create a soil health monitoring dashboard under the new EU-funded Africa Soil Observatory project.

Contributed by Samuel Mesele