Africa's soils are in crisis, with widespread degradation threatening agricultural productivity, biodiversity, and water regulation. Unsustainable farming practices, climate change, and population growth exacerbate this issue, leading to reduced crop yields, food insecurity, and economic hardship for millions. Women and youth are particularly affected, facing increased workloads and limited educational and economic opportunities. Addressing these challenges requires accurate and accessible soil health data, which is often unavailable or hard to obtain across the continent. This hampers policymakers and researchers in monitoring soil conditions, tracking changes, and implementing targeted interventions. The AUSO project aims to tackle these issues by establishing a continental African Union Soil Observatory (AUSO), which includes an African Soil Data Center (ASDAC) and a Soil Health Dashboard to fill existing data gaps. Managed by FARA and owned by the African Union Commission, the AUSO will consolidate soil data from various national and international sources, creating a user-friendly platform for soil health monitoring. Through efforts to address data shortages and develop national soil health strategies in 12 countries, AUSO will empower stakeholders in the public and private sectors to make informed decisions, prioritize interventions, and support evidence-based soil and land management policies that promote sustainable agriculture. AUSO will build on the Soils4Africa SIS and draw insights from the EU Soil Observatory and other initiatives, ensuring relevance and adaptability to the African context. The project will adopt a co-development approach, engaging stakeholders from national agricultural institutes, government departments, and other key organizations.

PHITO (Platform for Helping small and medium farmers to Incorporate digital Technology for equal Opportunities) introduces a ground-breaking digital tool specifically for small and medium farmers (SMFs) that are currently unable to benefit from the digital innovation increasingly adopted by larger producers. The platform connects data and people through a low-barrier app with two main purposes: (1) offering free data-driven farm advice on soil, water and crops tailored to SMFs (global element), and (2) improving synergic collaboration between farmers, consumers, and service providers while strengthening the local Agriculture Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS ) (local element). PHITO distinguishes itself from previous initiatives as a key example of frugal innovation , by downscaling the complexity of digital farming and making smart use of existing open geo-databases (through public domain data harvesting), and embedding this in the various local food systems and networks. Through co-creation together with SMFs and numerous local farmer representatives, PHITO will help to bridge the digital divide by providing better access to information and local networking, helping SMFs to improve their decision-making processes and consequently their economic and environmental performances.

Erosion is a major threat to the ecosystemic services provided by soils, especially for nutrient cycling, provision of food, water purification, leading to significant on- and off-site effects that needs to be monitored, studied and prevented. EUROSION will tackle this issue by developing and demonstrating a dynamic soil erosion monitoring system able to continuously and precisely estimate soil erosion across spatial and temporal scales, considering water, wind and tillage effects in agricultural lands. This will be achieved with: (i) the creation of a robust multi-scale monitoring network composed of EUROSION partnership and representatives of complementary monitoring stakeholders, (ii) the elaboration of a monitoring scheme using harmonized monitoring methods allowing to collect up-to-date and reliable data, (iii) interrelated wind-water-tillage-related process-based erosion models capable of quantifying soil erosion from local to EU scale and across time and estimate the impact of management practices. These enhanced knowledge and innovative bricks will lead to the development of a user-friendly interactive and open-access platform for policymakers, researchers and monitoring stakeholders to visualize dynamic maps of erosion and conduct further research. Thus, EUROSION soil erosion monitoring system will deliver reliable estimates and validated indicators, on which the project will take stock to provide policymakers and agricultural land managers with recommendations on best management practices reducing soil erosion, supported by tailored cost-benefit analysis. EUROSION will also enable science-based trade-offs for the development and update of soil-related policies, including the new CAP. The project will run in close collaboration with local stakeholders, EU policymakers, and the JRC, and will be implemented in specific 12 Monitoring Nodes, representing European erosion hot spots and key agricultural areas.

More than ever, soil health is an issue, as recent assessments state that 60-70% of European soils can be considered unhealthy. The Soil Deal for Europe aims to have 75% of EU soils healthy or significantly improved by 2030. Reaching such an ambition requires, among others, access to reliable, harmonised existing and new data and knowledge collected at local, national and EU levels to allow informed decision-making at all scales to support the Soil Health Law and the EU Soil Strategy. SoilWise will provide an integrated and actionable access point to scattered and heterogeneous soil data and knowledge in Europe, making them FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and improve trust, willingness, and ability to share and re-use soil data and knowledge. In three project development cycles, co-creation and co-validation by multi-stakeholder groups are the centre of project activities. SoilWise recognises existing workflows and repositories for specific user needs and aims to work with them to enhance their discoverability, approachability and interconnection. An open, modular, scalable and extensible knowledge and data repository building on existing and new technologies will be provided while respecting data ownership, access policies and privacy. AI- and ML- techniques will be employed to interlink scattered data and knowledge, automatise the processes, infer new knowledge and increase FAIRness. SoilWise applies infrastructure thinking instead of project thinking to design a repository for at least a decade to support EUSO evolvement accordingly. The SoilWise repository and community are designed to be a joint starting point and common ground for countries, the European Commission and other stakeholders to jointly guide soil and related spatial policy and informed decision-making towards the 2030 goals of the Green Deal, achieve healthy soils in 2050 and ensure broad uptake and implementation by land managers, policy, research and industry.