Food production in rich countries relies strongly on intensive use of external inputs at the expense of the environment and human health, whereas in poor countries, agriculture is characterized by low use of external inputs resulting in a meager production. To tackle these issues, agroecological practices based on crop diversification is considered as a promising approach to reduce inputs, and maintain or even improve crop production. In the Mid-West of Madagascar, the rain-fed and dry seeded upland rice system has become widely adopted by farmers because of limited irrigable lands. This cropping system is strongly infested by weeds, which are hardly under control because the only weeding intervention the poor farmers can afford is the time consuming hand pull method. An innovative upland rice cropping system using Stylosanthes guianensis cover crop, managed as a living mulch in a no-till system, was lately introduced in the region. This system was proven to supply nitrogen and suppress the parasitic weed Striga asiatica but its effect on weed community was not yet studied. A three years research was conducted from 2016 to 2018 in the Mid-West of Madagascar in order to understand if this innovative system can be a useful tool of weed management. The methodology was based on weed floristic recording on farmers' fields, experimental fields on real farms, experimental fields on station, and surveys on farmers' perception. Results indicated that the variables: weeding intervention timing, crop field age, the presence of maize intercropped with rice and soil management influenced the weed community. The no-till system with stylosanthes was observed to suppress dominant weed species of conventional tilled systems namely Digitaria spp., Richardia scabra and Eleusine indica, thus reducing the total weed biomass at harvest by 67%, and the total weed cover by 47% to 93% depending on the sampling dates. The innovative system also promoted other species namely Mitracarpus hirtu