A Golden Anniversary for the N2Africa Podcaster – the 50^th Edition! To celebrate we decided to ask for N2Africa staff to select one past article that for them exemplified the N2Africa approach or highlighted a particular key learning. As you read through I think you will agree it is a rich harvest that demonstrates the scientific excitement and the amazingly broad reach of N2Africa across the 11 countries.

Ken chose this article from a trip he made to Zimbabwe during the first phase of N2Africa which still triggers and intrigues him.

13^th European Nitrogen Fixation Conference (ENFC)
18-21 August 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden at the München Bryggeriet.

This European based biennial congress brings together scientists focused on biological N₂-fixation (BNF) from diverse research topics of biochemistry, microbiology, computational genomics, plant physiology, and more recently genetic engineering and aquatic microbiology.

• Tropical Grasslands Newsletter no.

• “Farmers’ use and adaptation of improved climbing bean production practices in the highlands of Uganda”. 2017. Ronner, E., Descheemaeker, K., Almekinders, C.J.M., Ebanyat, P., Giller, K.E. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment;
• “Options for improving the yield and nutritive value of maize and grain legume residues for ruminants in East African farming systems”. 2018.

• The N2Africa Vimeo videos that were on the N2Africa website have been made available as mp4 files.

For those who read Dutch: The Belgian EOS Tracé published “Afrika ontdekt de kracht van kikkererwten”

Fred Kanampiu selected this because as a learning grant, it is key to ensure timely feedback to generate and document learning to steer the implementation of the project. Having an up to date information from the field has contributed to the learning process of the project. This article appeared first in Podcaster 30, March and April 2015.

Theresa Ampadu Boakye, our M&E specialist, selected this article (Podcaster 46, June 2017) because it indicates that projects can do random implementation and still have adoption; meaning, guided selection of project beneficiaries (e.g. selecting beneficiaries who grew legumes only to have participated in N2Africa) will always leave out enthusiastic ones like Malam who would have adopted but would not have had the chance had it not been the project’s approach to expand to non-cowpea areas. There should always be room to include such.

Edward Baars chose this as it was a concept that slowly grew into the project by examples towards the capacity of the country teams to replicate and build upon, it also worked well in synergy with Monitoring Learning and Evaluation (MEL), whilst besides showing its capacity to reach output targets, it opened interest to research on its effectiveness and sustainability which in 2018 is a main activity for this learning grant project. First appeared in Podcaster 33, September and October 2015.