N2Africa was officially launched by the Director for Research and Development in the Ministry of Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives, Dr Fidelis Myaka on behalf of the Permanent Secretary Ms Sophia Kaduma at the start of the workshop held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on 19-20 February, 2014. The project launch was organized by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) ―one of the project’s implementing partners.
Speaking at the event, Dr Myaka lauded the project for singling out legumes. He said despite their obvious benefit to the country’s food security, employment, and even contribution to GDP, their productivity was low and yields were far below their potential.
"The application of scientific knowledge, especially by smallholder farmers, has always been constrained by poor targeting of the technologies to the diversity of farmers and farming conditions, poor packaging of technologies, and issues relating to input supply and output market, said Dr Myaka. I am aware that N2Africa’s approach puts into consideration all these factors through farming systems analysis to target technologies to the farming conditions of smallholder farmers and through a value chain approach," he added.
 |
Dr Fidelis Myaka (Left) and Ken Giller (Right) speaking at the project launch in Tanzania |
 |
Other speakers at the forum included the Director of the Project, Dr Ken Giller from Wageningen University who gave an overview of the project, Dr Bernard Vanlauwe, Director for Natural Resource Department of IITA who noted the N2Africa was important to IITA as part of its Natural Resource Management activities and Dr Fredrick Baijukya, the project’s coordinator who explained the scope and activities of N2Africa in Tanzania. The project launch brought together a wide diversity of stakeholders from those in legume production, input development, and supplies including seeds and fertilizers, processing, marketing, and regulatory bodies to policy makers.
Freddy Baijukya
Published before on N2Africa Facebook on February 24th