Interdependent Futures: Aligning Conservation, Agriculture, and Technology for Resilient Systems 

Across Africa, a rapidly growing population needs more food—but agricultural expansion continues to threaten the ecosystems that sustain both people and wildlife. Interdependent Futures shows that this trade-off is not inevitable. Through regenerative agriculture, geospatial technologies, and farmer-led innovation, food security and conservation can reinforce rather than oppose each other. 

Read the full paper. 

Agriculture and conservation can reinforce each other when soil health, livelihoods, nutritional needs, and ecosystems are managed together.  

  • Regenerative farming practices can restore degraded soils while improving yields, often reducing expansion pressure.  
  • Healthy soils underpin both ecological integrity and food nutrient density, linking farm-level management to public health outcomes.  
  • Farmer-led innovation like AgLivingLabs can spread solutions through peer-to-peer networks.  
  • Advances in geospatial mapping and artificial intelligence, when augmented by human insights, enable precision targeting of interventions, dependency modeling, and outcome monitoring. 

Meeting Africa’s food security needs while protecting biodiversity requires an integrated approach—placing soil health at the center, treating technology as an enabler rather than a solution, and empowering farmers to lead. When soil, water, and ecosystems are treated as shared assets rather than competing interests, agriculture and conservation cease to be rivals—and become partners in resilience. 

Authors

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DevGlobal

Spanning Africa, India, and the United States, DevGlobal Partners supports the world’s leading non-profits, companies, philanthropies, multilateral agencies, and government agencies on their innovation and sustainability initiatives. Our partnership includes DevGlobal and DevAfrique, and our expertise spans science and technology, public policy, philanthropy, communications, human rights, supply chains and business. Our team is guided by our mission to disrupt services for good. 
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Dr. David Bergvinson

Senior Advisor with DevAfrique and DevGlobal, brings more than 30 years in global development and agricultural development. Dr. Bergvinson’s previous roles include Chief Science Officer for a weather analytics company called aWhere, Director General at ICRISAT, and Senior Program Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he launched the Digital Agriculture portfolio at the request of Bill Gates in 2011. Dr. Bergvinson has employed human-centered design throughout his career that, together with partners, reached over 30 million farm families in emerging economies in service of higher farm incomes, improved nutrition, and resilience to climate change. Dr. Bergvinson has a PhD in Biology and Masters of Pest Management, Forest Entomology.

Laura Guzmán

Laura Guzmán is Director of Communications at DevGlobal, bringing over 13 years’ experience exploring how new technologies can be used to build a better, more equitable world. She has worked within nonprofits, foundations, social enterprises, academia and more, driven by a desire to tell impactful stories, elevate diverse voices and dig into the complexity of technology.
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