Urban agriculture is flourishing around the globe. Whether in Detroit, Paris, Milan or Brussels, more and more cities are taking food security for their citizens seriously. With cities becoming increasingly vulnerable to environmental and economic crises, urban agriculture is taking a leap towards the agriculture of tomorrow.

Based on the intuition that promoting sustainable agriculture would prove highly beneficial, Amaury Peeters, Louvain Coopération's national director in Cambodia, initiated a research project in partnership with the Ecoland research centre at the Royal University of Agriculture and the Earth and Life Institute at UCLouvain. ‘The primary goal of this research was to measure the benefits of sustainable agriculture on households and, secondarily, to inform civil society,’ explains Neang Malyne.

Louvain Coopération works every day to support local farmers in the provinces of Kampong Thom and Kampong Cham in Cambodia. Sustainable agriculture is emerging as a key way to lift them out of vulnerability and make them more resilient.

Climate change, water, air, pollution, inequality, North-South relations, participatory democracy: these are just some of the themes addressed on the placards and banners carried during climate marches organised across Belgium.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, thousands of children living on the streets are subjected to completely unacceptable conditions. Louvain Coopération is running two projects, in Kinshasa and Bukavu, to try to rescue as many of them as possible from the hell of street life. Last year, we helped more than a thousand children. Here is the story of Daniel, one of them.

Last May, we presented a project to support agriculture and craftsmanship in southern Burundi. In a few months, it will come to an end. We therefore wanted to show you the concrete impact and sustainability of an initiative that you have supported with us.

Louvain Coopération has been present in Burundi since 2003 and, despite years of civil war and the most recent political tensions in 2015, the UCLouvain NGO remains active in this country where the needs are enormous.

‘Women entrepreneurs are rare here. If it works, people say it's thanks to the husband. And if it doesn't work, they make fun of the woman!’ Despite this, some women take the plunge and manage to create a virtuous circle around their idea and their work. Louvain Coopération supports these women who dare to take action to change their destiny.

To address the major inequalities arising from the globalization of markets, Louvain Coopération has been working for several years to develop sustainable food systems. To achieve this, we are developing an integrated and systemic approach that aims to optimize each link and support each actor in the chain, from field to plate.

In a context where global food systems are facing major challenges, knowledge diversification becomes essential for their sustainable and equitable transformation. The article "Knowledge Democratization Approaches for Food Systems Transformation", co-authored by a group of researchers, including Amaury Peeters, Head of our Research & Development Department and published in May 2024 in the journal Nature Food, highlights the importance of integrating traditional, indigenous and local knowledge into decisions relating to food systems.

Chanmony Sean, a researcher at the Cambodia Development Research Institute, is currently doing a doctoral thesis on the agroecological transition in Cambodia, as part of our project “Agroecology and Safe food System Transitions (ASSET)”.

The overall objective is to build a tool and a methodology adaptable to local contexts, in order to evaluate agroecological systems in transition and support the actors of this transition. Chanmony has already conducted a critical review of current tools, their uses, their effects and their limits.