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Project Overview

So, what’s the problem

African Indigenous Vegetables (AIVs) are rich in vitamins and minerals. They are also improving food security and generating income for rural and urban communities in Africa.

Awareness of their nutritional benefits is growing amongst many East African consumers, and research organizations are producing improved varieties which are increasing demand and creating opportunities for small-scale enterprises.

However, this increasing demand for AIVs is being limited by a lack of available quality seed. The majority of farmers use either seed saved from their crops over many years or from open-air markets, with problems of both purity and germination. Relying on these seeds limits farmers’ access to seeds of improved varieties that have attributes preferred by consumers.

Farmer-led seed enterprises (where farmers – often in collaboration with other stakeholders – manage the production and marketing of seed) can, and do, contribute towards food and nutrition security as they promote crop diversity, as well as improving livelihoods through income earned from the seed.

Making them sustainable requires a holistic approach looking at the whole value chain and this includes ensuring effective production and marketing of the vegetables, which can, in turn, provide and sustain demand for the seed.

Many countries are currently developing policies focused on highly regulated systems that make it difficult to integrate informal and formal sectors. So, there is a need to collate and understand farmers’ roles in seed systems and the complementarity of informal and formal systems, to contribute to the policy debate.

What is this project doing?

CABI’s Good Seed Initiative (GSI) ran between 2013 and 2016. Its aim was to help farmers judge the quality and value of the crop seeds they buy, which, in turn, would empower them to demand good quality seed and improve their income by becoming suppliers of quality seed themselves.

Through this project, CABI wanted to promote AIVs and increase their consumption by both rural and urban consumers, helping to improve the variety of people’s diets and, at the same time, create demand and market incentives for producers of AIVs.

Promotional activities would be integral to encouraging the use of high-quality seed and the employment of Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) by vegetable growers, of which, both would lead to greater productivity and income for grower households, and demand for AIV seed to help stimulate seed value chains.

Developing and carrying out training for AIV seed and vegetable growers in GAP, value addition and business skills were also key. Furthermore, developing new varieties from landraces with characteristics that are desired locally and that could be embedded in other varieties for further spread was important.

In order to influence a new policy that recognizes the need for a pluralistic model, lessons learnt from our advocacy activities were evaluated, recognizing that seed systems need to be able to deliver different seed to ensure local demand is delivered effectively.