The cover image depicts an African mother and her four children all working very hard in their homestead field. Low productivity due to poor soil fertility is one of the major limiting factors for food security in Africa. Smallholders do their best to use all possible measures to increase crop productivity to help feed their families. However, the situation is still not optimistic. Most smallholders in Africa cannot easily get support from multi-stakeholder platforms, often meaning their efforts are in vain. Many African mothers imagine that if one day they could build their farming capacity with the support of multi-stakeholder platforms, like Chinese farmers do, they would no longer have to worry about their children going hungry. The Science and Technology Backyard model in China has provided adaptive technologies and knowledge transfer to empower smallholders with the cooperation of government, enterprises, knowledge hubs and farming communities. This model is providing important opportunities for achieving sustainable agriculture in Africa.