BIO4AFRICA

Bio-based innovation for African rural prosperity.

The project aimed to support the deployment of the bioeconomy in rural Africa through the development of bio-based solutions and value chains. It adopted a circular approach to drive the cascading use of local resources and diversify farmers’ income. 

The initiative focused on transferring simple, small-scale, and robust bio-based technologies adapted to local biomass needs and contexts. These technologies included green biorefinery, pyrolysis, hydrothermal carbonization, briquetting, pelletizing, and bio-composites and bioplastics production. By doing so, the project aimed to empower farmers to sustainably produce a variety of higher-value bio-based products and energy, such as animal feed, fertilizer, pollutant absorbents, construction materials, packaging, solid fuel for cooking, and ingredients for biogas production. This significantly improved the environmental, economic, and social performance of their forage agri-food systems. 

For this purpose, four pilot cases were set up with over eight testing sites across Uganda, Ghana, Senegal, and Ivory Coast. These sites offered more than 300 farmers and farmer groups of all sizes, including small dairy and lower-income farmers, women farmer groups, and transhumant pastoralists, the opportunity to test the technologies in real productive conditions. In the process, the project consortium, comprising 13 African and 12 EU partners, worked closely with local rural communities, extension services, and government. They jointly developed novel value chains driven by circular business models, all while safeguarding agronomic, environmental, social, and economic sustainability. 

DRAXIS held the responsibility for mapping the local agri-food systems, available feedstocks, actors, processes, resource flows, and value chains of the project’s pilot cases. Furthermore, DRAXIS undertook the conduction of the Life Cycle Assessment, the Social Life Cycle Assessment, and the Techno-economic assessment of the project. Analysis and Social Life Cycle Assessment were performed per pilot case to assess the environmental, economic, and social impact of the suggested bio-based technologies.