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 This
document gives an overview of CIAT’s research programme
in Africa, of what we have achieved and what we still hope
to do. It explains how our scientists are helping to meet
some of the continent’s most urgent developmental challenges,
not only by providing new technologies and other innovations,
but also by helping poor people to help themselves. Encouraging
farmers to try new things is creating a new generation that
can analyse its own problems and access or design its own
solutions to them. In other words, we are empowering people
to build and sustain their livelihoods.
Introduction
 The
African research programme of the International Centre for
Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) helps rural communities in the
region build sustainable livelihoods. It does this by fostering
strong, mutually beneficial relationships among national research
institutions, non-government organisations, the private sector
and, most importantly, farmers themselves.
By working in this way – using a bottomup approach –
CIAT can meet three crucial challenges that people in Africa
face: enabling rural innovation, improving the management
of tropical agro-ecosystems; and developing the potential
of agricultural biodiversity while ensuring better access
to new crop varieties.
Africa is not poor in natural or human resources; it is a
continent of promise and potential.  Yet,
of the 650 million or
so people living in sub-Saharan Africa, more than 200 million
are undernourished. It is a sad irony that as many as half
of these are farmers, landless labourers or others who earn
their living from the natural resource base. In Africa, more
than in any other developing region, increasing and sustaining
the productivity of agriculture is central to achieving the
Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and poverty
by 2015. The question facing CIAT and its partners is how
can science and technology contribute?
Roadmap to a Uniquely
African Green Revolution
The importance of agricultural research
and development (R&D) in Africa is stressed in a 2004
report entitled Realizing the Promise and Potential of
African Agriculture, from the Inter-Academy Council (IAC)
Panel on Agricultural Productivity. Commissioned by UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan, the report notes that investment in agricultural
R&D is a fundamental determinant of agricultural productivity
and, in turn, of economic growth. Enhancing African agriculture
is vital for reversing the region’s continuing slide
into poverty and hunger and setting it on the road towards
achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals.
 While
it may be tempting to try to emulate earlier agricultural
successes elsewhere in the world, CIAT knows that Africa needs
its own solutions. As the IAC report says, the original Green
Revolution experienced in
Asia and Latin America, based on a few highyielding staple
food crop varieties that can be grown under irrigation, is
not applicable here. African agriculture is radically different
from
Asian agriculture in several ways. First, it is mainly rainfed,
not irrigated — and highly diverse, with no single farming
system dominant. Second, African soils tend to have poor and
declining fertility. Third, women play a stronger role in
household food security. And, finally, the political and economic
environments are often not conducive to thriving agricultural
productivity. Competitive markets for produce are few, labour
productivity remains low, and both rural infrastructure and
agricultural R&D suffer from chronic under-investment.
To address the situation and create what the
IAC report calls ‘Africa’s Rainbow Revolution’,
we must attack simultaneously on many different fronts. To
this end, CIAT has engaged with national and international
organisations to form wide-ranging and inclusive partnerships
around three core areas: enabling rural innovation, managing
natural resources and developing and accessing agro-biodiversity.
Enabling Rural Innovation
One of the crucial recommendations of
the IAC report is that productivity improvement strategies
should be market-led. Improving the market access and competitiveness
of smallholder farmers has become one of the most important
and active areas of CIAT’s work in Africa. Globalisation
presents today’s farmers with new threats as well as
new opportunities. Increasing competition, coupled with the
volatility of markets, could all too easily push already disadvantaged
regions, countries or groups into deeper poverty and hunger.
Poor rural communities must be able to innovate
quickly but soundly if they are to avoid this fate. Experience
has shown that, by forming groups and small businesses,small-scale
farmers can exploit the new opportunities that arise in domestic,
regional and international markets. As farmers successfully
experiment and learn, the community begins to acquire a collective
capacity for continuous innovation that will improve livelihoods
over the medium to longer term. Efforts to build this capacity
fall under CIAT’s Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) initiative,
which receives support from the government of Belgium, among
others.
The Traditional Irrigation and Environmental Development Programme
(TIP) in Tanzania initiated an ERI project in 2002. Starting
with three water user groups in Lushoto, this local non-governmental
organisation (NGO) tested and adapted different approaches
to strengthening the capacity of farmers’ organisations
to exploit market opportunities. After two years, TIP created
a Marketing and Agro-enterprise Development programme, incorporating
ERI. In 2003, TIP
was awarded a new grant to implement this programme in a single
district of Tanzania. Today, the programme covers 20 districts
– a mark of its considerable success.
Decentralisation of government in Uganda has offered farmers
a uniqueopportunity to have their sayin the reform of local
bye-laws governing agriculture and natural resources. The
existing laws, imposed from a top-down perspective and marked
by weak enforcement, were ineffective and largely
irrelevant. With help from CIAT, the African Highlands Initiative
(AHI) and national partners, farmer groups in Rubaya sub-country,
Kabale district in the southwest of the
country revised and reformulated these bye-laws. The result
of the exercise is stronger social capital for collective
action,
greater participation of women in development, and better
arrangements for managing key natural resources. Neighbouring
communities and members of Parliament are now taking an interest
in replicating the approach elsewhere.
Rural Innovation Institute
In 2002, CIAT brought together its expertise
in participatory research, information management and agro-enterprises
under the Rural Innovation Institute (RII) based at its headquarters
in Colombia. To further strengthen our work on rural agro-enterprise
development, CIAT’s global programme is now managed
by a senior specialist hosted by the National Agricultural
Research Organisation (NARO) in Uganda. Farmers are better
able to seize opportunities if they understand the needs of
the market and can adapt what they are doing to meet these
needs. They can either add value to their existing crops,
through processing or selling into new markets, or diversify
into new, higher-value commodities. The experience of RII
and its partners has shown that rural people can be empowered
to become agents of their own change process, making their
own demands on rural R&D service providers, articulating
ideas for agricultural research to explore and becoming more
resilient to the shocks inherent in dynamic markets. The emergence
of new agro-enterprises should encourage rural communities
to invest in
preserving the natural resources on which their livelihoods
depend although this is a hypothesis that we as researchers
are testing.
Empowering farmers through participatory approaches
Participatory methods for action research
figure prominently in CIAT’s African programme. This
is our primary means of
ensuring that the lessons learned about improving food security,
building agroenterprises and managing natural resources are
widely relevant and can be readily adapted and applied in
other communities. Farmers who have participated actively
in the research process feel more ownership of research results
and are more likely to employ the resulting new technologies.
 Participation
must be inclusive if it is to contribute effectively to rural
innovation. Combining the views of all stakeholders –
farmers, other community members, outside business entities,
government and NGOs –gives a better idea of what direction
to take to ensure equitable outcomes and to avoid, or at least
attenuate, conflicts over the use of resources. One of CIAT’s
first steps in the innovation process is to encourage
communities to look at themselves in a positive light, analysing
their strengths and weaknesses rather than focusing only on
their problems. This type of collective analysis should reveal
a range of solutions that will be applicable to women as well
as men, that will help the least-fortunate members of the
community, and that will safeguard the environment in addition
to raising productivity and incomes.
The programme’s activities have demonstrated that community-driven
participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) can improve
farmers’ livelihoods by suggesting relevant and timely
agricultural innovations. Through PM&E, communities can
agree on what they need to do to achieve their objectives,
what indicators they can use to assess progress, and what
factors will make their projects succeed or fail.
Working initially in pilot sites with local partners, CIAT
is making excellent progress in encouraging sustainable rural
innovation in Africa. For example, in several countries we
have entered into Learning Alliances with a leading NGO, the
Catholic Relief Services (CRS), and Foodnet, sponsored by
the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in
Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA) and coordinated by the
Nigeria based International Institute of Tropical Agriculture
(IITA). In cooperation with CRS and Foodnet, CIAT scientists
have helped organise courses in eastern Africa on agroenterprise
development that have helped set others on this development
path. With help from local businesses and
organisations, farmer groups have begun developing the agro-enterprises
they consider to be the most attractive. One potato-producing
group in southwest Uganda targeted Nandos, a restaurant chain,
as a potential buyer of its crop. Undeterred by the rigorous
quality and quantity requirements,
the Nyabyumba farmers group undertook a complete overhaul
of traditional farming practices in order to become suppliers
to first-world consumers. For this group, farming was no longer
about producing a traditional product and hoping that traders
would buy it; for Nandos, buying the farmers’
products was business as usual, not charity.
Managing Natural Resources
A healthy ecosystem is a prerequisite for the sustainable
development of agriculture. As noted by the IAC report, the
continuous cropping of cereals without the use of inputs has,
in combination with other factors, led to a widespread decline
in soil fertility. This has become one of the most pressing
problems of African agriculture: about a half billion hectares
of the continent’s agricultural land are already moderately
or severely degraded, greatly undermining the efforts of farmers
to improve their livelihoods.
Enriching and maintaining fertility
CIAT is working hard to help reverse the soil fertility decline.
Since the early 1990s, CIAT scientists have identified new
soil management practices and have been testing them in collaboration
with farmers in several eastern African countries. T his
work has explored the value of various legumes that can improve
the soil and prevent the build-up
of pests and diseases at the same time as providing food and
fodder, as part of an integrated approach to natural resource
management. Farmers need to be able to monitor the fertility
of their soils if they are to manage them responsibly. To
enable them to do this, CIAT and various national partners
have developed a set of decision-support tools in the form
of training guides. For example, one guide explains how to
elicit, organise and rank farmers’ perspectives on soil
quality and integrate them with those of soil scientists.
This decision-support tool was adapted to conditions in eastern
Africa through training workshops in Uganda and Tanzania in
late 2000 and early 2001 that were co-organised by CIAT and
the African Highlands Initiative (AHI). Support was provided
by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), the CGIAR’s
Systemwide Programme on Soil, Water and Nutrient Management
(SWNM), and the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility (TSBF)
Programme.
A 21st century alliance
In December 2001, the TSBF Programme merged with CIAT to become
the TSBF Institute of CIAT. Based in Nairobi, the Institute
incorporated CIAT’s own work on soil fertility to become
the CGIAR’s most significant concentration of expertise
and resources in this area. Like CIAT, the TSBF Institute
encourages broad alliances and is partnered with a wide range
of other groups in addition to several other CGIAR centres.
Together, these organisations provide major inputs into the
African Network on Soil Biology and Fertility (AfNet) and
development programmes in Africa. They share a common approach
to soil management that identifies the following
priority actions:
- Empower farmers to apply integrated soil fertility management
(ISFM) practices on an appropriate scale – from individual
farm plots and households to entire landscapes and communities.
- Turn new strategic research on soil carbon and nutrient
cycles into practical measures that will boost and sustain
agricultural productivity.
- Devise new management practices that enhance a soil’s
ecosystem functions, such as carbon storage.
- Manage soil organisms and monitor their valuable contributions
to agro-ecosystem health and human wellbeing.
- Strengthen networks of scientists, development professionals
and farmers through training, partnerships and
information sharing on soil fertility.
Pest and disease management
A holistic approach to soil fertility means more than just
replacing lost nutrients. It also involves dealing with pests
and diseases. If Africa’s smallholders are to compete
successfully, they must be able to grow crops efficiently
— without resorting to the overuse of agrochemicals,
which are
not only expensive but also dangerous to human and environmental
health.
CIAT has a long history of successful research
to combat pests and diseases in beans. Working with farmers,
national agricultural research systems (NARS) and NGOs, CIAT
researchers have developed integrated pest management (IPM)
strategies against such intransigent problems as bean stem
maggot and bean root rot. In Rwanda and Kenya, multidisciplinary
teams have overcome major outbreaks of these pests and diseases
by improving soil fertility and by developing and disseminating
resistant or tolerant crop varieties.
 In
northern Tanzania, farmer groups and the national bean programme,
with support from CIAT, are successfully fighting the destructive
bean foliage beetle using an IPM approach that combines local
knowledge, notably of bio-pesticides, with new practices such
as rotation of bean crops with maize or sunflower. With support
from the UK’s Department for International Development
(DFID), this approach is now being applied to other pest problems
in other African countries.
The spread of IPM approaches is facilitated
by access to technical information from village information
centres (VICs), established and run by local communities.
CIAT and partners
have helped develop the VIC model, and forty VICs in five
countries have so far been set up.
Developing and Accessing
Agrobiodiversity
Healthy ecosystems provide a favourable setting in which to
introduce improved crops, enabling farm families to target
new markets after securing their own food supply. But new
crop varieties must also be able to grow reasonably well under
less favourable conditions, including low soil fertility,
drought, and pest and disease pressure.
In applying the power of modern plant breeding
to African agriculture, CIAT is improving three crops, or
groups of crops, that are especially important for poor people
living in marginal environments: common bean, cassava, and
tropical forages. At the same time, our scientists help national
partners acquire new knowledge and skills to boost their work
on crop improvement.
In Uganda, for example, CIAT and other CGIAR centres have
supported NARO in establishing a molecular biology laboratory,
inaugurated by President Museveni in 2003. Students from the
region use the lab to carry out their postgraduate research,
supported by funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and DFID.
Hi-tech facilities such as these better enable African researchers
to investigate useful plant traits and plant pathogens, further
enhancing national crop improvement
programmes. This work complements the strategy of the New
Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), which
in 2004 opened the Biosciences for Eastern and Central Africa
(BECA) facility at the International Livestock Research Institute
(ILRI) in Nairobi. CIAT scientists have already organised
training for African colleagues on DNA extraction methods,
molecular characterisation of plant pathogens, and the use
of molecular markers in crop improvement.
Common bean
Nutritionists refer to the common bean as a nearly perfect
food because of its high protein content, generous amounts
of fibre, complex carbohydrates, and valuable complements
of essential micronutrients such as iron and zinc. New varieties
thus offer a powerful means of combating malnutrition. Moreover,
as Africa’s cities expand, demand for beans is rising
rapidly. In much of eastern Africa each person consumes 50–60
kg of beans a year. Beans also have the advantage of a short
growing season, and since the crop is grown mainly by women
farmers, they reap most of
the benefits.
Since the mid-1980s, CIAT scientists have introduced
improved bean seeds to the midaltitude and highland areas
of central, eastern, southern and west Africa. This has been
done through the national R&D programmes that make up
the Pan-African Bean Research Alliance (PABRA). The alliance
includes the Eastern and Central Africa Bean Research Network
(ECABREN) and the Southern Africa Bean Research Network (SABRN).
These networks, in turn, belong to two regional organisations
– ASARECA and the Southern Africa Development Council
(SADC). Financial support is provided through a donor consortium
that includes the Canadian and Swiss governments.
Through partnerships between national research
institutes, universities, farmer associations, private companies
and NGOs, the networks are tailoring new varieties to the
diverse demands of local food markets, inter-African trade,
and more distant export markets. In Africa, bean sales now
top US$580 million a year, half being income to small farmers.
Among the first improved beans to win African farmers’
allegiance were climbing types. High yielding and resistant
to disease,these space-saving plants are an ideal crop
for densely populated, land-scarce areas. And while the success
of climbing beans is well established, one of Africa’s
best-kept secrets is the even greater impact of the new bushtype
bean varieties, which farmers have begun adopting rapidly.
In six districts of northern Tanzania, for example, 70 percent
of farmers report that they now grow the new
varieties of CIAT origin released by the Ministry of Agriculture’s
Selian Agricultural Research Institute - and households that
adopted new varieties now not only consume
more beans, but have seen their average annual income from
beans more than double in the past five years, to the equivalent
of US$590 per household.
To provide African partners with new options for helping the
many farmers who face difficult farming conditions, CIAT scientists
are developing beans with tolerance to drought and low soil
fertility. As part of the CGIAR Harvest Plus challenge programme,
they are also identifying bean germplasm with higher iron
and zinc content to reduce micronutrient deficiency, which
mainly affects women and children, and to boost the immune
systems of HIV/AIDS sufferers. If, as bean geneticists expect,
the content of iron can be doubled and that of zinc increased
by 40 percent, this nearly perfect
food will soon be able to do even more to improve human nutrition
in Africa and elsewhere.
Cassava
This starchy root crop, native to South America, was introduced
to Africa by Portuguese traders several centuries ago. Today,
it has become vital for Africa’s food
security, while also presenting new opportunities to link
smallholder farmers to new markets through value-added processing.
CIAT’s global programme on cassava breeding
and germplasm exchange, conducted in collaboration with national
partners and IITA, continues to strengthen the crop’s
development role on the continent. One of CIAT’s key
functions in this work is to transfer useful genetic variability
and highvalue traits – for example, high protein content,
good starch quality, and pest and disease resistance –
into Africa’s cassava gene pool. CIAT does this by providing
national programmes and IITA with advanced breeding materials
and samples of cassava wild relatives. In addition, CIAT and
IITA have jointly developed molecular markers associated with
resistance to cassava mosaic disease (CMD), a scourge of the
crop in several major cassava-growing countries.
With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, these markers
are helping national programmes in Africa to accelerate the
development of improved CMD-resistant
varieties.
Tropical forages
In Latin America and southeast Asia, improved tropical forage
grasses and legumes (some of them derived from materials
indigenous to Africa) have proved highly effective for simultaneously
intensifying small-scale livestock production and protecting
the soil. The appeal of forages to farmers lies in their nutritional
value for animals, high productivity and adaptation to stresses
such as drought and acid soils.
To enable African farmers to benefit from these technologies,
CIAT and ILRI have expanded their collaborative forage research
programmes. In one new initiative, the scientists are concentrating
on improving dairy systems in
eastern and southern Africa. The aim is to strengthen food
security, raise incomes, and improve natural resource management.
Initial results from recent on-farm trials by farmers in Ethiopia
show that Napier grass, lablab, vetch, pigeon pea, setaria
and vetiver are popular species of forage that farmers are
interested in growing on their farms. And in
eastern Uganda, an improved brachiaria grass bred in Colombia
for drought tolerance is proving attractive to farmer
research groups for dry-season feed.
Access to technologies
It takes more than the mere existence of new crop varieties
to improve the lives of smallholder farmers and their families;
these technologies have to be actively disseminated as well.
Most private seed companies still tend to focus on a few
highly commercial crops with large markets, while in Rwanda,
for example, there are no commercial seed suppliers at all.
As local demand for new crop varieties takes
off, farmers can take advantage of the new income-earning
opportunities they present by forming small seed production
businesses. Recent CIAT research has shown that, with adequate
support, even small-scale farmers are capable of producing
and selling high-quality seed of improved varieties. As part
of this, CIAT has developed training materialson the establishment
of small-scale seed enterprises. These manuals have proved
to be popular training products and, at the request of local
development organisations, have been made available to farmers
and development workers in eight languages widely spoken in
Africa.
National bean research programmes are supporting
decentralised seed production and marketing. Seed producers
are supplied with seed of improved varieties for assessment
and multiplication. They are encouraged to sell their own
seeds and to link with local traders.
Community-based seed production, in addition to raising farm
income and promoting the adoption of improved varieties,
should make agriculture more resilient in the face of natural
disasters. During a drought, for example, farmers will have
reliable, local sources of seed to replenish their losses,
instead of receiving poorly adapted seed from
elsewhere.
However, it is important to note that external perceptions
of seed systems can be flawed. In order to provide better
diagnoses of the effects of stress – either acute, short-term
emergency situations or chronic, long-term poverty-related
problems – CIAT with partners such as CRS and support
from the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
in Canada have been examining seed systems under stress. New
tools for quickly assessing the security of local seed systems
in times of acute or chronic stress are now helping donors
and relief agencies make faster, better decisions about seed
aid and germplasm restoration following acute emergencies.
These and other research-based activities will ensure that
farmers receive the right help when they need it, without
falling into a cycle of dependence on external assistance.
Towards a
Healthy, Competitive Africa
 We
believe that our focus on the three interrelated
R&D challenges of enabling rural innovation, managing
natural resources and developing agro-biodiversity is the
best way for us to contribute towards a healthy, competitive
Africa – a vision that the IAC shares. Enabling the
poorest and least advantaged to participate fully in creating
their own future will have a positive effect on communities,
regions, countries, and, eventually, the whole continent.
And building capacities of national systems to support farmers
and communities in their efforts enhances their chances of
success. CIAT cannot do this work alone. Our partnerships
and alliances are powerful ways of gaining local knowledge
and specialised expertise while simultaneously addressing
the diverse agendas of different stakeholder groups. By working
together,researchers, NGOs, extension workers, the private
sector, farmer groups and whole communities can make the lasting
eradication of hunger and poverty in Africa.
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CIAT in Africa: