RIU Best Bet looking at armyworm forecasting and control is set to impact on 60,000
6 July 2010

Outcome	Impact (number of people)
120 villages covered by improved armyworm forecasting and response systems; equivalent to 12,000 farming households	60,000

In addition to this work on armyworm forecasting and control, RIU is also supporting a number of other programmes in East Africa, namely: Africa Country Programmes in Tanzania and Rwanda, which will impact on over 1.5 million people.

RIU Best Bets - Stamp Out Sleeping Sickness; NERICA rice; resources for smallholder farmers; armyworm forecasting and control; Stopstriga; and Shujaaz - youth communication - will together impact on some 30 million East Africans.

This gives us a total predicted impact figure for East Africa of more than 36 million people.

Director of the RIU programme Ian Maudlin commented:

I am delighted that RIU has the potential to have impact at this scale across East Africa. Of course, the nature of these interventions and the type of impacts will vary: in some cases it is about disease prevention; in others it is about new ways of disseminating information; while others will enable innovation and access to research outputs which will directly increase household food security and prosperity.

Our challenge is to see how we can model what we are learning in East Africa, especially the involvement of the private sector and the emergence of what we are calling 'development-relevant enterprises' and see how this can be applied in other development contexts.