The Liberia Land & Soil Knowledge project, ‘Soils4Liberia’, is a four-year program (2024-2028) aimed at improving the management and use of land and soil resources to support conservation, sustainable agricultural intensification, and enhanced climate change resilience in Liberia.
ISRIC
Objectives
The project’s specific objectives include:
Establishing a fully functional Land and Soil Information System (LSIS) that contains reliable, up-to-date primary data and facilitates the management of soil data and information, as well as the generation of information products tailored to user needs.
Raising stakeholders’ awareness and understanding of the value of land and soil data and information, and strengthening their capacity to use such information for decision-making related to improved land and soil resource use and management, enhanced soil-related ecosystem services, increased agricultural production, enhanced climate change resilience, and better protection of land and soil resources.
Establishing a functional centre responsible for generating and managing relevant and reliable information on Liberia’s land and soil resources to support policy formulation, planning of interventions, and implementation of actions for agricultural development, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and resource conservation. This also includes strengthening Liberia’s capacity to independently conduct soil surveys and land use inventories.
From the outset, the project will engage stakeholders serving two main purposes:
To gain insight into the requirements for soil-related data and information, as well as the capacity of the stakeholder community to effectively use such data and information.
To define “use cases” through which stakeholders will be involved in developing practical applications of soil data and information for their own needs. Insights into user requirements for soil information will determine the types of data and information products to be generated and their specifications. This, in turn, will inform the design of the LSIS in the broader sense, including the field campaign design, specification of data to be collected (including desired soil analyses), and the workflows and data processes to generate the required information.
Consortium
Soils4Liberia is led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in close collaboration with the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences (MATE), the Regional Hub for Fertilizer and Soil Health for West Africa and the Sahel, the University of Liberia, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Central Agricultural Research Institute (CARI).
ISRIC will contribute by providing the sampling design for a field survey targeting 1,000 locations across the country for soil sampling; producing a new set of gridded digital soil maps with national coverage of key soil properties and soil health indicators; designing and implementing the LSIS; and contributing to capacity-strengthening efforts for local institutions.
Funding
The project is funded by the European Union (EU). The EU-funded action “From Productivity to Product, Linking Peers to Peers (P2P)” forms part of the broader Team Europe Initiative on Safe and Sustainable Food Systems (TEI SSFSs) in Liberia. This initiative provides the overarching framework within which the Soils4Liberia project is implemented.
