TechnoServe is a non-governmental organisation, formed in 1968, that works in poor areas of the developing world, helping to develop entrepreneurs, build businesses and industries and improve the business environment. They focus on helping entrepreneurial men and women in developing countries to capitalize on business opportunities which can transform their lives, generating jobs and markets for their products and services. TechnoServe offers a ‘hand up’ rather than a hand-out, giving poor people the power to transform their own lives.

The organisation works with various public- and private-sector partners, including USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2007 TechnoServe was rated as one of the world’s top five NGOs for corporate partnerships, and the organisation has also received the Presidential End Hunger Award from USAID.

PanAAC (Pan African Agribusiness & Agro-Industry Consortium) is a not-for-profit organisation that was formed in 2007 to promote sustainable agribusiness in Africa through enhanced productivity and competitiveness at national, regional and global markets. It is a private sector driven platform bringing together agribusiness and agro-industry groups and services to enable them to access information, knowledge, and partnerships.

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Launched recently in February 2010, IMAS is a project led by CIMMYT, a not-for-profit research centre working to improve maize and wheat crops, and is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID. Partners include the DuPont business Pioneer Hi-Bred, the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) of South Africa and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), who will all bring their expertise to help address the critical problem of increasing yields in poor soils.

The principal constraints on African maize yields are low soil fertility and low use of chemical fertilizers. Fertilizer use is constrained by high prices of fertilizers, which can be up to five times those in the USA. For the little fertilizer that is used, often no more than half of it is captured by the crop, the rest being leached into the soil and lost.

The new varieties will allow farmers to grow more crops, of better quality, but without having to purchase and use more fertilizer. Those developing the new varieties will be using a range of innovation methods to produce the new IMAS products, the first of which will be available to farmers within the next four years.

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A partnership between the USAID-funded Agribusiness and Trade Promotion (ATP) project and CropLife Africa Middle East was set up last year to help farmers in the West African region to strengthen their agricultural input–output chains, in turn improving the livelihoods of the rural populations.

The programme involves sharing knowledge of sustainable farming practices, building business links to ensure farmers have access to agricultural inputs, and raising awareness of the need for ensuring that only quality agricultural products are supplied to the market.

In 2010, the project has started running five-day Integrated Pest Management (IPM) ‘training-of-trainer’ workshops, which are intended to create a greater awareness among farmers of the impact of poor soil fertility and pests, including storage pests. The workshops cover pest and disease control measures, promoting the correct usage of crop protection products. Participants at the workshops are then encouraged to go back and share their knowledge on IPM with other farmers to help boost their production. Such interventions aim at ensuring food security by supplying the food chain with healthy, affordable and varied diets and by transforming subsistence agriculture into small-scale enterprises.

Since April 2008, the ATP project has worked in West Africa to increase the value and volume of intra-regional agricultural trade in order to stimulate the region’s own marketplace. The ATP project was established under the framework of the US President’s Initiative to End Hunger in Africa and currently covers six countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali and Togo.

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