Publications: About ISAAA
Transferring the Benefits of Research to Resource-Poor Farmers in Africa: The Experience of a Private Foundation Lawrence
Cockcroft Introduction How can small-scale farmers in Africa benefit more from the existing results of agricultural research? How can future research be strengthened by access to state-of-the-art plant science in the rest of the world? The trustees of the Gatsby Charitable Foundation (GCF) of the UK (a Sainsbury Family Charitable Trust) first began focusing on these questions in 1985. Since then, in association with various collaborating institutions in Africa, they have funded a set of projects that have found some positive answers. In 1996 the GCF began funding a collaborative project in Kenya between ISAAA, the Kenyan Forest Health Management Centre, and Mondi Forests Industries of South Africa (see p.25). This project will benefit from the lessons learned by GCF over the past ten years, which are discussed in this paper.
The Experiences It has been widely recognized since at least the early 1980s that the funding crisis facing most African governments has been so severe that the traditional model of agricultural development has been invalidated. In this model, research institutes support a nationwide extension service that provides several million farmers with the technology and skills to increase their yields of crop and livestock products year by year. This service to farmers is matched by credit from dedicated agencies and by guaranteed prices offered by state-owned marketing boards. The funding crisis facing most African governments has been so severe that the traditional model of agricultural development has been invalidated. The reality of the rural sector in Africa is now very different from this. The majority of scientists in research institutes suffer from chronic underfunding; indeed, their potential contribution is hardly tapped. Most extension services are barely able to deliver farm-level advice because they are effectively grounded, and few agricultural credit agencies have managed to provide incremental finance to farmers. Finally, most marketing boards have been wound down in the context of economic liberalization. Any agricultural initiative in Africa today must find ways around these problems, or at least some of them, if it is to be successful. The targeting of resources to carefully defined objectives, while at the same time recognizing the limits of what can be achieved, is essential to success. The need to target scarce resources has led GCF to work with its partners towards what might be termed 'research-managed extension' (RME). This approach is based on the premise that a phased handover of technology from research to nationwide ministry extension services will not be feasible. Instead, it may be more effective to empower research scientists to fund and mobilize relatively small cadres of extension staff in selected areas. GCF's experience suggests that, by establishing a fund that is primarily managed by research but that activates selected extension staff and rewards them according to the intensity of farmer contact, much can be achieved even in the unfavorable context described above. GCF was initiated into this approach in 1985 through its support of a collaborative project between Cameroon's Institut de Recherche Agricole pour le Developpement (IRAD) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). This project was designed to ensure the dissemination of the improved varieties of cassava and sweet potato that IITA had been developing for the previous ten years, varieties that had been tested on-station and on-farm in Cameroon in the early 1980s. The cassava varieties, which had previously made a major impact in southern Nigeria, were resistant to two major diseases, African cassava mosaic disease (ACMD) and bacterial blight, and were also very high yielding, with yields of up to 30 t/ha. The project involved further field testing in both research-managed and farmer-managed trials of a range of improved varieties and also established a large (40 ha) multiplication block and a series of smaller blocks which farmers could access at the local level. Over the period 1986-1990 about 6 million cuttings were distributed, primarily in the South West, Littoral, and Western Provinces of Cameroon. A sufficient critical mass of the improved varieties was delivered and made a lasting contribution to cassava production in the area. In 1990 IRAD asked GCF to consider funding an expansion of the project. The subsequent Phase 11 was organized on a different basis. A Root Crop Fund was launched, held in the private CCEI Bank and managed by a Board of trustees (chaired by the Director of IRAD but with strong representation from the bank). The board employed a project coordinator and was empowered to make both grants for research and loans to farmers and groups of farmers for multiplication and commercial utilization of the new varieties. After a difficult three-year period, the focus switched to women's groups, organized into tontines, which were the crops' prime multipliers and users. Tontines, i.e., group saving schemes, are a crucial part of the long-standing informal savings system in Cameroon (as in a number of other African countries, particularly francophone), and they provide the principal means of financing both smallscale investments and family commitments. In 1996 the project supported more than 200 tontines, with a total of over 2000 members, all of whom received working capital on a seasonal basis to supplement their regular savings. These groups are, wherever possible, connected to a network of a dozen rural micro-banks, initiated by the CCEI Bank. The idea is to provide an opportunity for the tontines to move into the formal banking system. The success of this approach has led the GCF trustees to support the formalization of the fund and the Board as a new Cameroon Gatsby Trust (CGT), which is now taking the project into Phase III. Discussions are underway as to whether it will be feasible to implement further phases of this project through a self- standing trust or a not-for-profit company as an alternative to working through the public sector. Since 1988, Uganda has experienced perhaps the worst outbreak of ACMD yet recorded. Cassava is a key food crop in this country, accounting for over fifty per cent of subsistence consumption in some areas. The outbreak, probably caused by a new strain of the mosaic virus, devastated production in the north and mid-north of the country, and has moved like a 'front' in a southerly direction over the past eight years. By late 1996 its impact was greatest in the southern districts close to Lake Victoria. In 1990 the forerunner of the National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO) asked GCF to fund the dissemination of the resistant IITA cassava varieties, which had been subject to on-farm trials with support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada on a small-scale basis since the late 1970s. In this case, the explosive nature of the problem and the degree of uncertainty about the response of the new varieties when faced with this intensity of infection necessitated a cautious, low-cost approach. This was achieved by a project with the following components:
The budget for this project was managed by the coordinator of NARO's cassava program, who was able to mobilize the necessary extension workers by paying daily allowances for both time and fuel, and by purchasing bicycles, motor bikes, and vehicles to ensure that material and manpower kept moving. Between 1991 and 1996 a total of 1350 extension workers, 2000 'opinion leaders' and over 16,000 farmers were sensitized to solutions to the mosaic disease problem in a series of workshops held at the district and subcounty level, linked to the availability of the planting material on the basis described above. This project has had a major impact in the target subcounties, where nearly 60% of the cassava area is now planted with the improved varieties. Given the scope for rapid sharing of stems between farmers, the impact at the district level has also been impressive, with about 20% of the total cassava area now covered by the new materials. Farmers have moved from experiencing yields of between zero and twenty per cent of the norm, as a result of mosaic disease, to yields which regularly surpass the norm. Aggregate production has returned to a level at which cassava can again play its key role in food consumption. The current focus of the project, which is still supported by GCF, is in introducing the same approach to the southern districts, which are now the worst affected by mosaic disease, and in strengthening the national research program so as to ensure that a series of appropriately adapted varieties are available. Of particular concern is the threat posed by mutations in the mosaic virus itself. Discussions are underway as to whether it will be feasible to implement further phases of this project through a self-standing trust or a not-for-profit company as an alternative to working through the public sector. The Cassava Biotechnology Network (CBN) has assisted NARO in developing a pilot project to support the tissue culture of cassava. This should provide useful technology and, eventually, improved germplasm to the breeding program in the future. The multiplication aspect of this activity could also be transferred to the trust. Following these successful experiences in supporting the diffusion of improved varieties to farmers in Cameroon and Uganda, the GCF trustees next wished to address the question of linking agricultural research in Africa to state-of-the-art research in the rest of the world. For some years GCF has supported aspects of research on crop molecular biology at the Sainsbury Laboratory, which is located at the John Innes Centre (]IC) in the UK. Discussions with the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) and with IITA indicated that these institutes would welcome the funding of a collaborative project with JIC and other advanced laboratories in the UK or elsewhere. These projects, the components of which emerged from a list of priorities prepared by potential participants, focused on the most effective ways in which advanced research could serve to unblock major bottlenecks in African agriculture. For example, the foremost concern of IITA was to move improved banana germplasm out of Nigeria to other countries that needed it. So here the model adopted by GCF was one of building institutional competence in the African research base and importing advanced techniques such as viral indexing to address this concern. The first stage of disseminating the technologies developed through this research will, wherever possible, follow the RME model. The viral indexing system for banana arising from this work is already being successfully used in Nigeria. It has also enabled IITA to transfer banana clones diagnosed as resistant to black sigatoka and free (or very tolerant) of banana streak virus (BSV) to Uganda for on-farm trials. The first stages of multiplication are currently under way in Rakai District, where the banana crop has been devastated by BSV. IITA is now organizing a similar initiative in Ghana. Collaboration between IITA and JIC is also focusing on the following problems:
An ICIPE/RES (Rothamsted Experimental Station) project addresses the problems caused by the maize stemborer. Under this project scientists are seeking to understand how the wild habitat surrounding a cultivated maize field influences the behaviour of these insect pests, with the objective of developing strategies to minimize their impact on the crop. This work has been successful at the experimental level, leading to the identification of trap crops that can dramatically reduce stemborer infestation. The trap crops not only act as an attractive habitat for stemborers but also encourage the breeding and growth of the parasitoids that destroy them. Key questions that need to be answered at the smallholder level will be examined through researcher and farmer-managed trials in two districts of western Kenya over the next two years. If the promising results achieved so far are sustained, GCF is likely to start work with ICIPE, the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and the Ministry of Agriculture to develop an RME project to capture the potential benefits of this work for a large number of farmers. Starting in 1997, GCF will fund a collaborative project between the Forest Health Management Centre (FHMC) of Kenya and Mondi Forests (MF) of South Africa (see p. 25). Brokered by ISAAA, this project focuses on the transfer of tree micro-propagation technology and the dissemination of the resultant high-quality seedlings to small-scale farmers on a commercial basis. It will include an outreach program, so that farmers can visit both on-farm trials and the plots of those farmers who will be the project's first customers. MF has an impressive track record in the in vitro micro-propagation of eucalyptus and pine on a commercial basis. The company has agreed to make this technology available to FHMC, and to assist FHMC in scaling up its existing operations in the micro-propagation of Grevillea robusta, a key multi-purpose tree that Kenya's small-scale farmers highly value. GCF funding will extend for a four-year period and will be channeled through the Kenya Gatsby Trust (KGT), which is also funded by GCF and provides various kinds of assistance to small-scale informal-sector artisans. This arrangement appears to be the most appropriate mechanism for funding a project that is initially in the public sector but will eventually be transferred to the private sector. It will help in distinguishing the assets of the project from those of FHMC, and will also facilitate the eventual division between FHMC and KGT of the revenue resulting from a sale to the private sector. These projects go some way towards answering the two questions which the GCF trustees have sought to address. What are their wider implications? And, in particular, are the projects replicable? As many large development agencies have found, institutional, social, and economic factors often undermine the opportunity to transfer a successful project from one context to another in Africa. However, some tentative lessons may be drawn from GCF's experience, though each of them will need to be re-examined in the light of further experience.
Some Relevant Lessons First, the need to optimize the use of very limited agricultural extension resources means that, at least in the first phase of a project, committed research scientists can be empowered— through funding of the 'marginal' time of selected extension personnel to orchestrate a closely supervised extension effort. Besides disseminating technology, this approach has the added advantage of allowing the continuous assessment of the technology by both farmers and scientists. Second, in embarking on a new project, an organization such as ISAAA should always have a strategy or strategies for the eventual dissemination of the technology developed through the project, whether the technology is physical (e.g. improved germplasm) or knowledge-based (e.g. an IPM package). In formulating its strategy, ISAAA should recognize that it will not always be possible to involve the private sector, at least for the first three or four years of dissemination—and even when this is feasible, the 'private sector' should often be a not-for-profit organization with representatives of the public and private sectors on its Board. A crucial ingredient of success is a 'project champion' within the scientific community Third, notwithstanding the above emphasis on institutional development, a crucial ingredient of success is that there should be a 'project champion' within the scientific community. He or she should be clearly identified as the individual who will work continuously to ensure that the objectives of the project are achieved. While this is no doubt true everywhere, it is especially true in Africa, where institutions tend to be particularly weak. GCF hopes to be able to build upon these and other lessons in its future work with ISAAA and other organizations devoted to making the benefits of plant science available to resource-poor farmers in Africa.
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