Through N2Africa, farmers in Zimbabwe have perfected the agronomy of grain legumes, and they are now perfecting their grain legumes processing skills. Over the years, the N2Africa team in Zimbabwe has worked with farming communities to perfect the art of processing soyabean into different nutritious products. We have seen this bearing fruit as farmers now grow soyabean, irrespective of the availability of a ready external market.

Cowpea fritters

In Malawi, N2Africa is working to resolve some of the issues through engaging farmers in trainings and capacity building, field demonstrations and sensitization on new technologies such as the use of rhizobial inoculant. N2Africa is collaborating with Kasungu District Agriculture Development Office (DADO) and Churches Action in Relief and Development (CARD) to conduct training on inoculation, appropriate soil fertility management, integrated pests management and post-harvest practices.

N2Africa, in collaboration with its partner in the soyabean value chain iDE (International Development Enterprises), is testing the adaptability of five promiscuous soyabean varieties (earlier, medium and later maturing) for the first time in the Zambezi Valley, a non-traditional soyabean area. The Zambezi Valley is characterized by soils with heavy texture, therefore not the most recommended for soyabean.

Linkages among soyabean value chain actors in Tanzania are weak and coordination between participants and enterprises seem to be a totally alien concept. For over one year now, N2Africa and CRS led - Soya ni Pesa project (SnP) have been working to foster partnerships in soyabean value chain development. As meaningful partnership starts to develop, a strong team from N2Africa and SnP, once again, took the initiative to meet various stakeholders. This time to monitor activities and identify on ground challenges and opportunities to expand collaboration.

BNF outreach in west Kenya now includes working through local primary schools to install simple legume technology demonstrations and hold low cost farmer field days around them. This move was spontaneous, meaning not planned by the Country Coordinator, but originates among 13 WeRATE R4D Platform members working through 22 schools in response to reduced funding for outreach activities within the Phase 2 Tier 1 arrangement.

In January-March there was the possiblity to follow the Wageningen MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) on "Growing our future food: crops" via edX. This succesfull six weeks course, that brings you knowlegde to understand and quantify the basic agricultural proceses, will also be offered as Summer Course. Part of the course material is filmed at N2Africa locations. The start date for this course will be June 15^th and access will be available until September 25^th.

Please see http://www.scidev.net/global/food-security/news/beans-africa-fertiliser-farming.html for a news report.

Although I always argue that benefits from nitrogen fixation should be seen as an additional source of N rather than a substitute, journalists seem to prefer to state the alternative!

Ken Giller

Andrew Farrow wrote, with support of the country coordinators of the Core Countries, a background report pointing out the action areas for Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda in 2014.

ADVANCE, a partner for N2Africa in northern Ghana, sent us the March edition of their ADVANCE II Newsletter. In this issue, they share news of how a nucleus farmer is supporting female smallholder farmers increase yield and income, how women in agriculture were celebrated on the International Women’s Day, some field stories and many more.