Major universities from six African countries will next year stand a chance to develop regional hubs for agricultural learning with the help of grants worth US$20 million from the World Bank via the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM).

The beneficiaries will be selected by the World Bank after a call for proposals is released in September. They will be in Cameroon, Mozambique, Malawi, Ghana, Kenya and the Ivory Coast. The chosen universities will be expected to use the money to address key knowledge gaps in Africa’s agricultural sector, including dealing with climate change, building professional agri-business production and distribution chains, data management and mitigating post-harvest losses.

The awards will be one of the biggest grants given to universities through RUFORUM, established by 10 African vice-chancellors in 2004, and now comprising 85 African universities from 36 countries, which is supported by the World Bank and other donors.

“The idea is for the universities to model themselves as anchors for the region in order to cause transformation and have a wider impact. That is why the grant is being given to institutions rather than individual researchers,” said Dr Paul Nampala, grants manager at the Kampala-based RUFORUM secretariat.

These awards build on RUFORUM’s existing funding procedures through which it has been supporting the training of scientists and innovative agricultural research programmes by giving grants to faculty members in its network. The money is often sourced from charitable foundations and governments.

Impactful research

“The aim of the grants is to develop interventions that impact rural development, and universities, if supported, can do impactful research,” said Nampala.

Studies show that for agriculture in Africa to grow rapidly and contribute to transformation and development, enhanced capacity in research and development is crucial, he noted.

RUFORUM’s current grants are segmented and often range from US$4,000 given to undergraduate students to conduct focused field work (usually under the guidance of a PhD student or a professor), and up to US$350,000 given directly to projects run by senior professors. These projects usually run from anywhere between one to three years. 

“In order for a proposal to win, there must be evidence of working as a team. It should also demonstrate a clear engagement with communities,” said Nampala.

Nampala said although universities are designed to teach, research and outreach, teaching often attracts the bulk of resources and finance because of African governments’ education investing priorities. RUFORUM grants are designed to fill such gaps.

Dr Drake Mirembe, a lecturer in the College of Computing and Information Sciences at Makerere University, Uganda, says knowledge-generating institutions such as universities should not be disassociated from industries within their home countries. “Farming communities need to work with researchers who generate knowledge and institutions that generate the knowledge need to understand the farmers,” said Mirembe.

Increase research outputs

Grants such as those from RUFORUM, he said, help scientists to boost the current low research output across Africa. 

RUFORUM grants are also designed so that grantees define what research they want to undertake. For Mirembe, this kind of independence helps researchers focus on areas that are responsive to the needs of local communities. 

As a RUFORUM grant recipient, he has collaborated with other scientists in Uganda to look at how different aspects of the agriculture value chain can leverage the power of information and communications technologies (ICT).

One of the projects Mirembe and his team have been implementing focuses on using mobile and web-based applications to track and monitor the certification and distribution of clean cassava planting materials. 

Cassava, a staple food in Uganda, has in recent years been threatened by cassava viral diseases, which have largely been attributed to poor monitoring and tracking of the planting materials, including production, certification and distribution.

With the introduction of a mobile application, Mirembe said farmers in the area where the project was implemented – Kole, Apac, Bukedea and Serere districts in northern and eastern Uganda – are now able to trace the source of the materials they are planting, minimising their exposure to poor quality materials. This also means the spread of cassava virus diseases is reduced. 

“With a good ICT system to track the cassava seed, right from the certification to the harvest, packaging and distribution, you minimise the entry of fake [infected] seeds into the market,” Mirembe noted.

Food security

Another good example can be seen at the Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, where Professor Elenimo Khonga’s RUFORUM-financed project sought to promote oyster mushroom production as part of a cereal crop production system, which is now being adopted by several African countries.

Khonga said encouraging the cultivation of oyster mushrooms would address food security challenges among small-scale farmers whose income from grain production continues to remain low despite farm input assistance from the government.

“If drought results in low grain yields, the remaining crop residues should contribute to farm income through mushroom production. The technology is not just for farmers: entrepreneurs, especially the youth, can grow mushrooms and reduce unemployment rates,” he said. 

At the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin, Professor Achille Assogbadjo is using a RUFORUM grant to run a project called “Scaling up the African baobab food products valuation through enhancing their safety and value chains for food and nutritional security”, focusing on Africa’s iconic baobab trees.

“The baobab is a majestic African food with medicinal, economic and cultural importance. It can live for about 5,000 years, which makes it a strategic agroforestry tree in fighting food insecurity and improving incomes for local farmers,” said Assogbadjo, a professor of conservation genetics, forest ecology and ethnobotany.

As well as promoting food security, increasing consumption of baobab fruit pulp delivers nutritional benefits which cannot be commonly obtained from the cereal-dominated diets of the dry lands of Africa, according to Assogbadjo. 

His research seeks to balance the population structure of baobab trees to guarantee a continued supply of baobab products, ensuring the security of baobab pulp extraction, developing packaging and food processing technologies that ensure the fruit’s nutrients are maintained.

“This project will contribute to a better structuring of the baobab value chain product and improve its competitiveness,” he said.

With the tree ultimately becoming economically more valuable, Assogbadjo believes it could also diversify the agricultural sector and contribute to more jobs, especially for African youths.

Nampala said over time the grants have led to strong collaboration between universities in the region. “Previously universities would put up a course and it is still their course, but now we have courses that are being conducted across borders,” said Dr Nampala. 

A case in point, he said, is a doctorate in agricultural and rural innovations, currently being jointly implemented by Uganda’s Makerere University, Egerton University in Kenya, and Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania and facilitated by RUFORUM.