As indicated above, we have been busy the past few months with a proposal for Phase II of N2Africa. We ran a number of partnership workshops, including a workshop in Uganda where all countries were represented in June 2013, and submitted a proposal to the foundation in July. Since then we have worked closely together with our two senior project officers at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Charlene McKoin and Vi Shukla, to address a number of comments and concerns from referees.

On November 4^th, 2013, we welcome, at the Hilton Nairobi, the steering committee, our partners and stakeholders to the round-up event of the first phase of N2Africa. Four years ago, N2Africa embarked on a mission to put nitrogen fixation to work for smallholder farmers in Africa. Now, we are ready to present the results from our work over the past four years and the achievements of the project.

N2Africa has invested substantially in identifying the best grain legume varieties and appropriate management practices for integration into African farming systems. Variety trials were conducted to acquire promising varieties of bean, cowpea, groundnut and soyabean, comparing them to current lines for yield, N₂-fixing capacity and adaptation to abiotic and biotic stresses. Input trials are conducted to assign the best-fit agronomic practices to the best varieties.

The N2Africa project defined its Vision of Success for generating impacts that, given the magnitude of the constraints to agricultural development in the project countries, the innovative nature of this project, and the complexity of change dynamics, will take at least 5-10 years to achieve. Reaching the end of the first phase, we conducted an early impact assessment to establish progress made towards achieving the Vision of Success.

Over the last few months, we have been preparing a social media strategy for N2Africa. The launch of this strategy will coincide with the November meeting, with a dedicated Facebook page as a central element. The Facebook page will promote N2Africa activity and link directly with partners and supporters, some of whom already have a social media presence. The N2Africa Facebook page will be updated regularly with videos, pictures and articles sourced from the Podcaster. If you have suggestions about what to feature, please let us know.

Introduction

Background

Climbing bean is a key crop in the northern Rwandan cropping system, grown by 95% of the interviewed households in the N2Africa baseline survey. N2Africa promotes the use of improved varieties and P based fertilizers in climbing bean cultivation in Rwanda. Through dissemination trials, farmers get the opportunity to test new climbing bean technologies. N2Africa monitors in each country a sample of these multi-locations trials through a field book providing valuable information on driver of variability in yield and in performance of N2Africa technologies.