Eastern and Southern African countries need to formulate and implement appropriate policies to help smallholder farmers access technologies that will enable them to increase farm yields and improve crop resilience and nutrition to address poverty, food security, and economic growth, renowned Zimbabwean agricultural economist and academic, Mandivamba Rukuni told a high-level policy forum.
CIMMYT’s Sustainable Intensification of Maize-Legume-based Cropping Systems for Eastern and Southern Africa (SIMLESA) project and the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) of South Africa hosted a five-day gender training workshop on 24-29 August in Pretoria, South Africa.
Called “Situating Gender in SIMLESA”, the workshop aimed at increasing awareness of gender issues in agricultural research and development, and identifying practical solutions to integrate gender into SIMLESA. It brought together a core team comprised of SIMLESA’s project leader, project manager, gender focal points, monitoring and evaluation specialist, communications specialist, and country coordinators. In his opening remarks, Litha Magingxa, ARC Group Chief Executive (Agri-Economics and Capacity Development), commended SIMLESA for the gender training.
Smallholder farmers in East Africa can attain food security and move from subsistence to commercial farming by sustainably intensifying their maize-based farming systems. This was revealed during the annual field days recently held in Kenya and Tanzania, which were jointly organized by CIMMYT’s Sustainable Intensification of Maize-Legume Cropping Systems for Food Security in Eastern and Southern Africa (SIMLESA) project and the two countries’ national research systems.
The objective of the field days was to examine how the new experiments under SIMLESA Phase II were progressing and gather farmers’ feedback on some of the sustainable intensification interventions. They also showcased SIMLESA’s farmer-tested improved maize-legume technologies.
The Adoption Pathways project was part of a portfolio of projects that has contributed to the broader theme of sustainable intensification research led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and made possible by the contribution of several teams from national and international research groups brought together by funding from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). The project was undertaken in the five Eastern and Southern African countries of Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. 1. Gender disaggregated three wave panel data set (2010/11, 2013), building on a legacy dataset collected under a related ACIAR funded project (SIMLESA) is now being developed covering close to 3500 households in each data wave across the five project countries. The 2015/16 data will be available in due course. 2. Several empirical evaluations of the gender gaps in technology adoption, food security and market access have been completed and published. 3. These results have been shared in various policy forums including but not limited to annual project meetings. In order to achieve its full impact in the coming years; we propose that new projects and initiatives based on the work of the Adoption Pathways project be established. These should focus on capacity building for the analysis of panel datasets, continued work on studying intrahousehold input allocation and sharing of agricultural output and scaling up the findings from this project to influence next generation of sustainable agriculture policies.
By Johnson Siamachira and Gift Mashango
Sustainable intensification through conservation agriculture (CA) is not only necessary but urgent. This is the key message and approach that SIMLESA is focusing on, in collaboration with its international partners and national agricultural research systems (NARS) in Africa.
