FIPS-Africa - 1.5 million seed packets with advice to 180,000 farmers

17 July 2010

Andy Ward

It was great to a catch up with FIPS-Africa and see how things are progressing on this RIU Best Bet project.

FIPS-Africa works through a network of village based agriculture advisors. Advisors have been established in seven districts in Kenya and Tanzania. They currently have 186 village based agricultural advisors in Kenya (funded by RIU and other programmes). Each of these advisors has a target of reaching 1000 farmers. RIU Best Bets supported the addition of the advisors in the following districts.

District	Number of advisors in place	Advisors being recruited and trained	Total
Siaya	8 advisors	12 advisors	20 advisors
Vihiga	15	-	15
Kisii	11	9	20
Kilungu	14	-	14
Taita	15	-	15
Meru	15	-	15
Moshi	20	-	20

As well as providing farm inputs, such as small packs of seeds and fertilizer, these advisors are being trained to support farmers through their knowledge of:

• water harvesting
• soil management
• early maturing crop varieties
• drought tolerant crops and varieties
• diversification of crops away from maize

Eventually, as their businesses become viable, the advisors will become a network of independent small-scale entrepreneurs. So, in the next few months FIPS-Africa will add business skills to their training package.

During the last couple of months the technical skills of the FIPS-Africa team have been further developed through working together on seed priming with David Harris. The seed priming work has seen a close collaboration between FIPS-Africa and another RIU Best Bet, StopStriga which is being delivered by the Real IPM in western Kenya. However, the technology for seed priming with added phosphorous is not as well developed as we had been hoped and further exploration of options is required before it can be widely promoted.

The FIPS-Africa team have also been working on soil and water conservation (particularly conservation tillage) led by Jo Anderson, The RIU work programme has benefitted from links across the FIPS-Africa portfolio- supported by CIP, AGRA, KASAL and Kenya Maize Development Programme (e.g. networks, communication tools, inputs). This means FIPS-Africa is linking the supply of farm inputs and consolidation of feedback to inform learning across the organisation from all these work streams.

Currently, FIPS-Africa unit packs up to 8000 small packs of seed per day, which means their annual capacity is close to 1.5 million packs. Work is underway to determine the feasibility of placing paid for advertising on the packs - offering businesses exposure to a market of at least 186,000 farmers in rural Kenya. If FIPS-Africa were able to attract advertising on each small pack worth just Ksh, 1 (US cents 1.25) this would be equivalent to approximately US$ 18,000 per year towards their running costs. Further, because of FIPS, these farmers are improving their food production and income and will therefore have more disposable income than they have ever had before, making them even more attractive to advertisers.

Working with Shujaaz
When it originally applied to Best Bets for funding, FIPS-Africa planned to work in close collaboration with Shujaaz - the multimedia youth communication initiative- as a source of agricultural stories and as a means of increasing its reach. After a recent feature in Shajaaz on sweet potato, many readers responded to an invitation to send text messages to receive information about improved varieties, which were passed on to FIPS-Africa's regional co-ordinators. FIPS-Africa will be following up to see if any have readers have purchased vines.

Once business plans for village-based agricultural advisors have been developed and management, reporting and evaluating processes are all working smoothly, Shujaaz will run a story about becoming a young entrepreneur providing agricultural services and inputs in the rural areas. At the end of the story they will place an advertisement asking interested young people (in areas where FIPS-Africa already has a district coordinator to supervise them) to apply to become village-based agricultural advisors supported by FIPS-Africa with a start-up kit (e.g. thermos flask for vaccines, knapsack sprayer, seeds, posters and so forth) and training. Shujaaz has also agreed to create cartoons especially for FIPS-Africa to help with teaching.

During the next 3-months we hope to be reporting on how FIPS-Africa is working with new partners to see their approach adopted in other African countries.

Evaluation
Baseline surveys have been designed and students have been hired on attachment for collecting data during the June-August holidays. Excel templates for data entry are being developed and a database expert and a data entry clerk are being hired.