Egyptian emigrants to the big cities or crossing the Mediterranean to Europe are most often young men belonging to rural rather than urban areas. Migrants and refugees move to Europe driven from their country of origin (“push factors”) and because they are drawn to Europe (“pull factors”). The challenge to be addressed in this project is reducing the number of people seeking to leave the countryside or their countries due to the lack of attractive prospects. In Egypt, agriculture and rural regions clearly remain a source of resilience for many families in the face of economic shocks. This project supports the Egyptian rural-community with the necessary qualified graduates and university expertise to improve agricultural productivity, enable more sustainable food production, develop the poor villages, enhance farmers’ income and their living conditions to prevent migration to cities or abroad. The project has five specific objectives that can be summarized as follows: 1. To identify the push factors for migration from rural communities and identify the needed qualifications to support rural development. 2. Modification and re-orientation of the existing post- and undergraduate curricula to supply the market with graduates who contribute in the implementation of the country’s sustainable development vision and ensure the sustainable rural development. 3. Establishing four DeVilage Service Offices at the four Egyptian universities to provide technical support for the farmers and public and private sectors. 4. To develop a capacity building programme to train and equip the professors in the Egyptian universities with the knowledge and tools to address the different dimensions of sustainable agriculture and rural development.5. To develop Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as Open Education Resources (OER) for spreading the knowledge and raising the awareness of different stakeholders.

The project SIRAM (Sustainable Innovations for Regenerative Agriculture in the Mediterranean area) aims at developing, scaling-up and disseminate innovative regenerative agriculture approaches to tackle issues related to climate change, desertification, loss of biodiversity excessive use of chemical and low incomes in small-holders farms in the Mediterranean. The tested approaches will be in line with the main principles of regenerative agriculture, namely the adoption of no-tillage practices, the use of cover-crops, the screening of local varieties with resistant traits, the synergic application of biostimulant and bioprotecting microbial strains co-formulated with organic fertilizers from recycled wastes. The project goals will be achieved through a lab-to-farm approach that starts from the molecular and chemical screening of existing crop varieties, microbial strains and organic waste biomasses, in order to select and tailor the best ones which will be tested in 8 case studies representing different Mediterranean scenarios under different pedoclimatic conditions but facing common issues. SIRAM will adopt a systemic approach focused on the tripartite soil-plant-microbiome system. At soil level, mechanisms of soil organic matter stabilisation and greenhouse gases reduction through no-till, cover crops and amendments will be tested; at microbial level, advancements in the understating of basic mechanisms through which certain microorganisms induce plant systematic resistances to insects and fungal attacks will be provided; at plant level the focus will be on the selection of resistant local varieties and on the understanding and exploitation of mechanisms by which plants can select beneficial microorganisms in the rhizosphere, especially after biotic and abiotic stresses (e.g. severe pathogens outbreaks and climate change related droughts).