Knowledge

The programme aimed to intensify the cropping systems with grain legumes to improve the productivity and sustainability of rainfed agriculture while diversifying smallholder farmers’ income-generating opportunities. 

Agriculture begins with seed. Without seed, there can be no crops and no food production. When harvests fail or seed stocks are lost, seed insecurity ensues, which can reduce food security and livelihoods. 

This How To Do Note (HTDN) in this toolkit on Supporting Smallholder Seed Systems tackles the complexities of seed systems, setting out a process to support national agricultural policy decision makers, national and international development agencies and IFAD Country Programme Managers (CPMs) in the design and supervision of seed-related projects. The other publications in this toolkit are the Teaser and Lessons Learned.

This publication, Lessons Learned, presents some key lessons from the experiences of IFAD and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and other seed-related development projects. These lessons will help the reader of the How To Do Note (HTDN) to have a greater understanding and appreciation of the framework for analysing national seed systems and how to use the HTDN to inform the design and implementation of more effective seed projects.

The goal of the project was to increase the income of rural smallholder vegetable producers through the improved safety and quality of vegetables in the supply chain for domestic markets.

IFAD’s support to the Nigerian Government’s poverty reduction programme in rural areas targets large numbers of smallholder farmers and is essentially people-centred. IFAD supports programmes and projects that work with communities, and with smallholder farmers as the key players.

South-South and triangular cooperation has an enormous potential role in agriculture and rural development in developing countries, both in unlocking diverse experiences and lessons and in providing solutions to pressing development challenges.

From the cases that follow, a number of common lessons emerge. First, it is important to create a space for interaction and cross-country learning. In the Scaling up Micro-Irrigation Systems project or with the household mentoring approach, for instance, workshops and ‘writeshops’ gathered people from diverse countries who could then share their own knowledge and experiences. In such spaces, participants could compare how a similar approach or technology required certain adaptations to better fit with local cultural, social and environmental contexts, offering important lessons for future scaling up.

Sometimes individual champions can make a difference. In Madagascar, the project design for a public/private partnership improved drastically when an IFAD consultant with similar experience in another country became involved. In this case, it was also an ‘unexpected outcome’, as the innovation came from a replacement for the regular consultant, who had broken his foot …. So even through small staff changes, knowledge of a complementary innovation from another country can have a big impact.