December 29, 2015

By Shahnaz Mahmud

The African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) was created in 2003 with the goal to improve the productivity of African smallholder farmers by negotiating and facilitating access to appropriate technologies. The AATF helps to create public-private partnerships between organizations that own new technologies and products and those that wish to use them to increase agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa, says Dr. Denis T. Kyetere, Executive Director, of the AATF. The foundation wants to see Africa grow, be able to feed itself and turn into a key exporter of agricultural produce.

Currently, the AATF has 11 public private partnership projects in 13 countries, including Water Efficient Maize for Africa, Cassava Mechanization and Agro-processing, Nitrogen-Use Efficient, Water Use-Efficient and Salt-Tolerant Rice and Bacterial Wilt Resistant Banana.

Activities of the AATF

Dr. Kyetere points to the Cassava Mechanization and Agro-processing as a good example of a finely-tuned project. “One of the key constraints to cassava production in Africa has been the lack of mechanization and reduction of drudgery or of appropriate production and processing tools,” he explains. “This project’s goal is to address these constraints by facilitating access to mechanization equipment, encouraging use of best management practices and facilitating market access for produce.” The project’s activities started in 2012 in Nigeria and Zambia and recently in Uganda involving public and private sector partners. To date over 2,600 hectares of cassava have been cultivated through mechanization in the three countries using improved cassava cuttings and applying best management practices such as use of fertilizer and weeding, says Dr. Kyetere.

AATF’s latest project is known as Seeds2, a partnership with The Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, which began in 2013. “The availability of quality seeds of new improved varieties has been one of the greatest constraints facing African agricultural growth,” notes Dr. Kyetere. “As such, the project aims at providing a unique business model that will enable the direct licensing of products between seed technology owners and seed companies in Africa to ensure that seeds are available at the right time, place and price.” The project is facilitating access to seed technology innovations to commercial partners either for further development or for dissemination through available market channels. The project is linking readily available seeds from national, regional and international technology owners (public and private) with seed companies in Sub-Saharan Africa through mechanisms involving royalty payment to guarantee African farmers’ access to high quality seeds and traits, he also says.

While Africa is the sole focus, its supporters are global in scope. The AATF’s original funders were The Rockefeller Foundation, United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Its current roster includes DFID, USAID, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Howard G Buffet Foundation, and The Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture.

Some of the challenges the organization faces is related to biotechnology, which the AATF was set up, in part to deliver, to increase the agricultural productivity of African smallholder and resource constrained farmers. “There are negative voices against the use of biotechnology across Africa and abroad,” says Dr. Kyetere. “These voices hamper the development of such innovative technologies and are a cause of concern.”

Pushing Forward

Still, the organization continues to push forward with all of its plans. Part of a refreshed strategy in 2012 saw alignment of the AATF’s work with that of other agricultural players in Africa. “This resulted in a more dynamic strategy that is seeing AATF focus on appropriate technologies whether proprietary or not,” says Dr. Kyetere. “These technologies are providing the organization with the opportunity to reach even more farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa faster through availing a larger pool of tools to address their constraints; and expand its reach of farmers to also include resource-constrained and not smallholders only, a definition that is based on size of land.”

Of its collaborations, Dr. Kyetere says each one is unique and “brings diverse partners and dynamics that need to be managed to ensure the end goal of accessing and deploying technologies to smallholder farmers is achieved”.

Looking ahead to 2015, Dr. Kyetere says some of the AATF’s projects are quickly progressing into the commercialization phase. Thusly, 2015 will be very critical as the organization endeavors to facilitate the deployment of its products to ensure that they get into the hands of farmers who  need them as quickly as possible.

Speaking to the greater global agriculture space, Dr. Kyetere emphasizes the it is faced with the challenge of feeding a growing population “even as attendant challenges continue to plague agricultural productivity. Some of these challenges include climate change and emerging pest and diseases. These make the development and adoption of new innovative technologies such as drought and disease tolerant/resistant crop varieties critical.,” he says.