Celebrating two years of the Sustainable Fertilizer Academy
IFA is excited to celebrate the second anniversary of IFA’s Sustainable Fertilizer Academy (SFA). Since its inception, the SFA has rapidly expanded its activities while maintaining its primary focus on educating the industry on the sustainable management of fertilizers. As we mark this occasion, it is a fitting opportunity to reflect on the achievements of the last year and share a glimpse of some of our exciting upcoming plans.
This year, the focus of SFA has been expanding its reach and scope to new regions while creating new partnerships. In practice, this has meant reaching a larger student base with more courses and ensuring the SFA offerings are as accessible as possible for users from around the world.
The platform’s first year brought with it 200 students and 70 certifications. Its second year brought a jump to over 1,000 new online students from even more diverse geographies. Countries newly involved in the SFA in the last year include Brazil, Turkey, China, Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, and the United States of America.
Partnerships have been a crucial feature of this second year of the SFA’s operation. A collaboration with Sino-Agri, an IFA member company, allowed us to reach a record 1 million agronomists from across China through live-streams of classes on topics such as nutrient recycling, nutrient recovery, fertilizer impact on biodiversity, and crop nutrition data.Our partnership with the West African Fertilizer Association (WAFA) has allowed us to take selected courses offline and directly into classrooms. IFA co-hosted on-site workshops at universities in Nigeria and Liberia, with the success of this initiative allowing an additional 800 students to benefit from our services. We are looking forward to continuing our work with local universities as enabled by WAFA by expanding into Mali and the Ivory Coast in the coming weeks.
This increased reach has meant that additional language options have been of vital importance. To address this need we added English and Spanish subtitles to all SFA videos. Portuguese and Turkish quickly followed to facilitate specific partnerships and initiatives.
As IFA goes into the third year of the SFA’s operation, we are excited about our plans for the future, including expansion of our activities into China, India, and Turkey as well as continued work in West Africa. With this expansion comes the opportunity to focus on more region–specific challenges in sustainable farming practices. In part, this will be done through improved access by farmers to our fertilizer courses (for example, through existing mobile phone apps of IFA members) to give them the tools they need to improve yields in a sustainable manner. And more subtitles like Arabic will be added to all SFA classes, too.
We are grateful to our founding partner organizations and all who have supported the SFA on its journey so far. We are excited to share the next chapter with you.
