Market access for agro-enterprise diversity in the Lake Kivu Pilot Learning Site of the sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Programme

The Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) commissioned a pilot study to understand the role of markets and marketing systems in African agriculture and to test the Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) and its innovation platforms (IPs) as a new strategy for wealth creation. This was in response to the fact that Sub-Saharan Africa’s small-scale farmers seem to have been trapped in cycles of poverty, and that the regional economy has stagnated. Using a market baseline survey in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Programme (SSACP) found that disorganised markets and marketing were major factors in perpetuating poverty cycles and subsistence agriculture. These markets are characterised, among others, by too many players within a value chain, a lack of collective marketing and collective purchasing, poor transport infrastructure, a lack of value addition, poor market information, poor access to market information or a total lack of market information, and unfavourable trade policies and/or a lack of any. Although smallholder farmers are the highest investors in terms of land, tools, time, labour, inputs and transport along the value chains, they benefit least when it comes to earnings. Hence it is not economical to produce surpluses in the absence of assured markets, good market policies and reliable marketing strategies. The results show that gender is an important component in the value chains, depending on the historical realities. In the DRC, for example, a country that has been in crisis for long, women have ventured into long- and short-distance trade. In Uganda, a country that has been at peace for at least 20 years, men trade more and further away from home. In Rwanda, where there has been 15 years of peace, men and women seemed to share the trading space in the country equally. It was also observed that the IAR4D approach may be the most relevant and appropriate one for addressing poverty in SSA through its integration of markets as core ingredients in agriculture, and the formation of innovation platforms (IPs) with stakeholders interested in the plight of farmers in their localities

Principles, design and processes of integrated agricultural research for development: experiences and lessons from LKPLS under the SSACP

With increasing recognition holding the promise of overcoming the outstanding problems faced by African agriculture, IAR4D faces the danger of being ‘blurred’ by past approaches and falling short of its potential to deliver the desired impacts in diverse multi-stakeholder, biophysical, socio-economic, cultural, technological and market contexts unless its actualisation and working is clearly understood. In this paper, we present the conceptualisation and principles of and knowledge-based experiences and lessons from the implementation of the sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Programme (SSACP) in the Lake Kivu Pilot Learning Site (LKPLS). The presentation covers the formation and facilitation of IPs for the actualisation of IAR4D to evolve mechanisms for the early recognition of interlinked issues in natural resource management, productivity and value addition technologies, markets, gender and policy arrangements. These have autonomously triggered flexible, locally directed interactions to innovate options from within or outside their environment for resolving the challenges, and have moved along a new institutional and technological change trajectory. Emerging lessons point to the endowment of IP members with selfhelp knowledge interactions, training in IAR4D, quality of facilitation and research to be key determinants of the power behind of self-regulating mechanisms