UNLEASHING THE ECONOMIC POWER OF VEGETABLES IN AFRICA

Growing populations and rising incomes in sub-Saharan Africa, especially in urban areas, are increasing market demand for vegetables as consumers seek to diversify their diets. With quality seed, farmers can meet this demand by producing the nutritious vegetables consumers want, and thus realize higher profits.

“Unleashing the economic power of vegetables in Africa through quality seed of improved varieties” funded by UKaid aims to develop hardy and nutritious amaranth, tomato, chili pepper, and mungbean varieties for East Africa and develop the structures and mechanisms to strengthen the supply of quality seed throughout the region.

The project has three main activity areas:

I. Strengthening quality vegetable seed supplies in Africa

• Establish a vegetable breeding consortium for Africa
• Develop a multilocation testing network
• Identify farmer and consumer needs (variety characteristics and pest management needs)
• Carry out trials of about 20 varieties
• Set up demonstration and on-farm trials
• Build capacity in seed production and variety development
• Review vegetable seed policies and regulations to remove constraints to seed sector development
• Monitoring and evaluation

II. Triggering a mungbean transformation in Africa

• Characterize a mungbean mini-core collection representing the genetic diversity in the WorldVeg genebank collection
• Test high potential mungbean lines in multilocation variety trials
• Promote improved lines and good agricultural practices to farmers
• Build capacity of national mungbean researchers
• Establish “seed villages” for production of quality seed
• Develop recommendations for mungbean market development
• Monitoring and evaluation

III. Strengthening Center-wide Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) and impact assessment

• Develop improved monitoring systems for scaling projects
• Collect baseline data to support UK aid scaling efforts
• Quantify returns on investment (ROI) for mungbean in Asia
• Long-term studies to measure the sustainability of impact
• Improve the quality of ongoing impact studies
• Strengthen the capacity of WorldVeg in M&E and impact assessment