N2Africa has been granted an extra US$5 million supplementary grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand its activities to Borno State, North-Eastern Nigeria. The request that N2Africa start activities in Borno came from the State Governor, another signal that the N2Africa story is reaching its potential clients! This initiative is aligned to a polio vaccination campaign, supported by the foundation, and will operate in a set of Local Government Areas in the south of the State, where security is less problematic (see map).

The second phase of N2Africa is organized around a decentralized structure with much of the decision-making processes residing with the coordinators of the core countries, in close consultation with the project leadership and coordination team.

We’re happy to present three posters which are ready to use as extension materials in N2Africa. Two posters deal with inoculation, presenting inoculation methods for the two most widely used inoculants, LegumeFix and Biofix.

IITA and N2Africa are exploring commercial inoculant production through its recently established Business Incubation Platform (BIP). A new building was constructed at the BIP that has ample room to accommodate different inoculant production lines and scales of operation. The factory consists of a warehouse area, a carrier preparation room, a station where broth is prepared and mixed with carrier, a curing room, a product storage room, and a quality control laboratory.

Field work was started in the Cropping season of 2013 from May to November 2013. Two field trials have been conducted as follows and preliminary data analysis done: 1) Effect of intercropping patterns on biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) and crop productivity and 2) Effect of cowpea-maize relay intercropping on biological nitrogen fixation and crop productivity across fields of different soil fertility levels in northern Guinea and Sudan savanna agroecological zones of Ghana.

N2Africa Phase II is going full speed ahead, and we’ve already had our first round of reporting to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In the first months of N2Africa Phase II, we have made good progress towards Objective 1 - Project strategy, coordination and implementation and capacity strengthening. Country teams were formed and soon after involved in many meetings and workshops. In addition, an overall technical expertise team, leading activities across all countries, has been established.

The successful proposal of Phase II of N2Africa has given us an opportunity to select sites for the new countries in N2Africa to maximise the relevance of the research findings for different environments and communities. Since the middle of 2013 I have been collating information and reviewing the literature to identify the major factors that promote or hinder the adoption of grain legumes in sub Saharan Africa.

On June 30^th the report on Media events in N2Africa (related to Milestone 4.4.4) was published. It tells about ways that were used so far to get the N2Africa message disseminated widely.

Humidtropics is organizing an International Conference on Integrated Systems for Sustainable Intensification in Smallholder Agriculture, 7-10 October 2014 in Ibadan, Nigeria. For the conference website, poster and announcement follow this link.