Seed capital today - yam tomorrow: RIU announces funding for yam project in Nigeria
30 June 2010

A project which aims to make disease-free planting material more readily available to yam farmers in Nigeria has recently been awarded a £110,000 grant by RIU under its Commissioned Work programme.

Andy Frost of RIU said

"A scarcity of quality seed remains a fundamental bottleneck in the effort to improve food security throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The first step therefore is to make clean quality planting materials available to farmers. Currently pests and diseases are major constraints to yam production in West African. Farmers often have to plant poor quality material that is often already infected, leading to low yields of this regionally important crop. Yams are a staple food in West Africa and yet over the years several varieties have been lost to a combination of pests and diseases. There have been several efforts to improve seed yam quality. These attempts have failed due to lack of sustainability and/or because of the adaptation of inferior technologies. We have found a project which can overcome many of these obstacles and this is why we were keen to invest in capacity building this promising work."

This initiative is led by the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary. Their Diocesan Development Services have been working at a small scale in Kogi State, Nigeria, since 2002, promoting an improved yam multiplication technique, known as the mini-sett approach, to more efficiently produce larger amounts of disease-free planting material. The mini-sett approach was developed through research including that supported by DFID's Crop Protection Programme.

The mini-sett project was originally submitted to RIU under its West Africa Best Bets call. Although the Best Bet reviewers had several issues with the proposal as submitted, partly because it lacked the prerequisite private sector partner, RIU management saw merit in the proposal and decided to fund it at a reduced level through its Commissioned Work programme.

RIU's Commissioned Work programme is designed to allow a highly flexible and responsive approach so that promising initiatives and ideas can be supported and nurtured to enable them to reach their full potential. In this case, the RIU grant is seed capital to get the mechanism functioning. RIU personnel will be working closely with Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary to help them scale up further and to make their approach more attractive to other investors. This should make the project much more sustainable and increase the chance of getting the model replicated in other parts of West Africa.

The eventual aim of this initiative is to establish 'seed yam specialist' farmers who will grow clean seed yam and act as suppliers for their local communities throughout the region.