Few farmers in sub-Saharan Africa have access to new, improved varieties of local food crops capable of producing abundant harvests in what are often harsh conditions. Closing this seed gap is a challenge given the continent’s shortage of agricultural experts, its large diversity of staple crops and huge variety of pests, plant diseases, and other environmental stresses.

AGRA programmes are tackling these challenges through projects that bring farmers and scientists together to develop and distribute seeds suitable for local environments while also supporting genetic diversity and farmers’ rights to save seeds. AGRA “Programme for Africa’s Seed Systems” (PASS) is funding African-led initiatives that use conventional breeding to develop new varieties of maize, cassava, beans, rice, sorghum, and other crops resistant to diseases and pests. The goal is to develop and release more than 1000 improved crop varieties over the next ten years.

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Poor soil health is directly linked to poor harvests. Africa’s food production lags in part because its soils are low in nutrients and organic matter, and have poor water holding capacity. Until these conditions are reversed, Africa’s soils will continue to degrade and its food situation will further deteriorate. Already, more than 75 percent of farmland in sub-Saharan Africa is severely degraded. This leads to environmental destruction as farmers in depleted areas move into forests and other natural areas in search of more fertile land for farming.

AGRA is developing a comprehensive Soil Health Initiative to revitalise African soils. This will require improving soil management practices and giving small-scale farmers access to both organic and mineral fertilisers, along with information about their efficient and environmentally safe use. The Soil Health Initiative builds on the 2006 African Fertiliser Summit, which brought a new level of consensus among African leaders about the need to provide rural African farmers with the affordable soil nutrients they desperately need. The initiative will also promote soil enhancing practices such as intercropping with nitrogen-fixing legumes and use of minimum tillage where appropriate.

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Water scarcity and inefficient water use is a major problem for African farmers. Over 90 percent of Africa’s poor farmers depend on rainfall, which is unpredictable at best, to sustain their crops. Few small-scale farmers have access to irrigation—only 4 percent of farm lands in sub-Saharan Africa are irrigated compared to 37 percent in Asia. Furthermore, degraded soils fail to adequately capture what little water is available.

AGRA programmes will provide farmers with greater access to water and new ways to make more efficient use of this scarce resource, such as trapping it in small ponds or cisterns, and employing farming techniques that allow the soil to retain moisture. AGRA is also exploring easily adaptable “micro” irrigation techniques that use simple methods like foot-operated treadle pumps and low-cost drip irrigation systems to ensure that crops continue to thrive during periods of drought.

Markets can play an important role in improving the incomes of poor farmers. However, markets in Africa are generally poorly organised and volatile, and often inaccessible to small-scale farmers. Also lacking is the market information that farmers need to negotiate good prices for their produce. Even such basic information as current wholesale and retail prices is rarely available. Therefore, building efficient and well-integrated input markets (through which farmers can buy supplies), and output markets (enabling farmers to sell their harvest) is key to encouraging farmers’ adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies.

AGRA will explore a variety of ways to strengthen markets, including through pro-poor market information systems; improved storage, processing, and utilisation of local food crops; commodity exchanges that improve regional trade in grains; and ways to stabilise market prices and improve farmers’ access to credit. AGRA will also explore ways to improve the competitiveness of African farm produce in global markets.

Read more about the Agro-Dealer Development Programme »

Local agricultural expertise is essential to sustaining rapid agricultural development. But most African countries are spending one-third less per capita on agricultural research today than they were twenty years ago. This has narrowed the pipeline of graduate-level agriculture students in Africa and undermined agricultural extension services (the publicly funded programmes that provide farmers with on-site technical expertise).

The continent urgently needs more African agricultural scientists and a strong network of agricultural extension services. Therefore, AGRA recently launched a programme to bolster agricultural research by funding more graduate-level training for a new generation of African agricultural scientists. The programme expects to support an additional 170 M.Sc. and 80 Ph.D. plant scientists within five years. AGRA is also developing an initiative to support innovative extension services that can help small-scale farmers adopt new crop varieties and soil management techniques, and make use of new marketing programmes. In addition, under its Soil Health Initiative, within the next five years AGRA will support at least 200 M.Sc. graduates in the fields of soil science, agronomy, and natural resource and environmental economics.

Read more about our Education Initiative »

Throughout all of its work, AGRA will consult with and learn from Africa’s small-scale farmers, many of whom are women. Revitalising African agriculture requires a partnership with the continent’s farmers and an appreciation of how gender affects everything from the farming tools used to the ability to buy seeds, own land, and access credit. In the past, many well-intentioned efforts to boost production on Africa’s small-scale farms have failed because solutions were offered without first forming a partnership with farmers themselves.

In contrast, AGRA efforts seek locally driven and adapted approaches that draw from the deep well of knowledge accumulated by African farmers about the types of crops, farming techniques, climates, and other expertise that will be required to boost farm production and end hunger in Africa.

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There is a growing appreciation among African leaders of the relationship between policy and agricultural production. AGRA is committed to working with its partners to promote well-co-ordinated national, regional, and global policies that accelerate agricultural growth for small-scale farmers and that promote environmental health.

Such policies may address high taxes and tariffs that raise the prices of agricultural inputs; smart subsidies to enable poor farmers to make use of new technologies; promotion of the safe use of agricultural inputs; environmental monitoring and sustainability; and the development of rural infrastructure. Only with strong advocacy and support of policy change will a sustainable and productive African agriculture become possible.

AGRA is an ambitious and multi-faceted undertaking, and is committed to monitoring and evaluating its work to ensure that projects are well-managed, improve the lives of small-scale farmers and are environmentally sustainable. AGRA is establishing systems to provide management oversight of Alliance initiatives and conduct panel surveys of key barometer countries over the next ten years. This work is one way to ensure that the perspectives and voices of small-scale farmers are incorporated into decision making.

AGRA will utilise the latest information technology to collect and analyse information for each of its programmes, and will make this information available to all in order to promote transparency, learning, and accountability.

Pursued collectively and comprehensively, these multiple efforts have the potential to make a major difference for Africa’s small-scale farmers and, through them, all of African society. The time is ripe for a new, sustainable, and uniquely African Green Revolution.