In August 2012, a group of Nigerian Youth Corp (NYSC) members, trained at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Headquarters, Ibadan (Nigeria) established the IITA Agripreneurs (IYA) as an independent agribusiness enterprise involved in the production, processing and marketing that cuts across value chains of several crops as well as the production and marketing of vegetables and fish.
Rwandans are among world’s top consumers of beans as it is a preferred legume across livelihood zones and wealth groups. This staple is considered as meat for the poor or a near complete food, mainly due to its nutritious nature: common beans contain proteins, resistant starch, dietary fiber, vitamins and minerals.
Hyejin Lee completed her MSc thesis entitled "Assessment of changes in households food availability, access, utilization and stability using farm stratification associated with the introduction of legume technology in Salima district, Malawi" at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart as part of an Erasmus exchange programme between Wageningen University and the University of Hohenheim early December.
Jeff Ehlers as key note speaker
On November 13th Jeff Ehlers was key note speaker in the CSIS conference, "From the Ground Up: Translational Research Pathways to Improve Lives of Smallholder Farmers." Washington D.C where he talked about the N2Africa project and its research loops in his presentation "Challenges and Examples - Research for Farmers" from the Gates Foundation Perspective".
The website is made more accessible recently. You will find the content is better organised and the search function has improved. To get the most out of your search you can use AND and OR searches. To assist you Marcel Lubbers wrote some guidelines for this function.
NoduMax is a new legume inoculant for soyabean recently developed at the IITA Business Incubation Platform and the N2Africa Project. The inoculant contains >1 x 109 Bradyrhizobium japonicum strain USDA 110 per g and is packaged in an alumino-laminate bag along with gum arabic adhesive and user instructions. A series of 28 product runs resulted in 79% acceptance of this adopted threshold.
During this conference the last day of the congress, I presented summary results of my two papers and posters on "Improving shelf life of legume inoculant in East Africa". And ‟Performance of Indigenous Rhizobia Strains on grain yield of two Promiscuous Varieties of Soyabean in South-Kivu soil". The first poster on improving shelf life of legume inoculant in East Africa won a prize of 1000 DH = 120$ for it high quality content and clarity.
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At the end of September I attended the annual meeting of the CGIAR Consortium for Spatial Information (CSI). The meeting was supposed to be part of the African Agricultural GIS Week in Accra, Ghana but was relocated to ITC in Enschede due to Ebola fears. |
N2Africa coordinator Fred Kanampiu visited N2Africa activities in DR Congo from October 6 to 10, 2014.
Highlights of his visit were to see: