Seed Systems Group

Subsistence-level farming in Africa is unsustainable.  As rural populations grow and spread, agricultural lands are depleted and rendered incapable of providing a stable, decent existence.  Poverty and malnutrition spread throughout rural communities, and people lose faith in farming as a livelihood.  This trend is now being worsened by climate change.

It does not have to be this way.  There is a solution to low crop yields and the poverty trap of subsistence farming in Africa.  Farmers in several African countries have recently reversed decades of declining crop yields following the adoption of high-yielding, locally-adapted crop varieties produced by local seed companies. But millions of farmers have been left behind.

We build sustainable, low-cost production and delivery systems for high-yielding, climate-resilient seed of nutritious food crops in areas where this technology remains beyond the reach of smallholder farmers.  If taken to scale, it can end hunger in Africa in our lifetime.

Fifteen African countries where local farmers have no access to seed of improved, climate-resilient seed are home to 320 million people and 38 million farm families.  These countries have an average rate of child malnutrition (stunting) of 38%, and their average rate of absolute poverty is 51%.  Meanwhile, their populations are growing at 2.8% annually, meaning they are doubling every 23 years. 

Agriculture is the main source of income of the vast majority of the people living in these countries, yet they have so far been denied access to the most critical technology to help them grow more food and live better:  high-yielding seed.

African countries which are popular targets for international donor agencies, meanwhile, have largely moved on from subsistence agriculture through the adoption of improved seed.  Meanwhile, the needs of farmers living in countries like Chad, Benin, DR Congo, Madagascar, Eritrea, Guinea, and others have been ignored by the international community.

The left-behind countries of Africa suffer from negative images that are largely unfounded today.  There is a perception problem, compounded by language barriers. 

This form of negligence must now end.  It is time to take off our blinders and end hunger in ALL of Africa.

Throughout history and around the world, rapid increases in agricultural productivity have resulted from the adoption of better seed.  Improved seed works by converting sunlight, water and nutrients into harvest-able portions of the plant more efficiently.  They are resistant to pests and diseases and carry special traits such as drought tolerance and quicker growth. 

After a long delay, some African countries, too, are now experiencing an agricultural transformation as local farmers gain access to higher-yielding, climate-resilient seed.

The biggest hurdle is in linking the latest products from crops research to a functional, affordable delivery system.  Through experienced gained in 14 countries, SSG has perfected the development of seed delivery systems for poor farmers through a series of parallel, systemic investments in:  1) crop variety testing; 2) establishing local, private seed companies; 3) developing a network of input supply shops at village level; and, 4) raising the awareness of the value of improved seed through distribution of small, sample packs, electronic messages, and on-farm demos. 

The approach works by brings together science, learning, and local entrepreneurship for the benefit of poor farmers.  With proof-of-concept in 15 African countries, it is now time to extend this model to the continent's left-behind countries.

This work directly targets a significant proportion – 320 million - of the most vulnerable people on earth.  They are the poor, isolated, often-ignored people who cultivate the land in some of the least known, least-considered countries in the world. 

They are people identified in lofty speeches given by world leaders and proclamations made at summits, but who rarely figure into the funding or actions taken.  They are the people ‘at the end of the line’.  Not only are they poor and isolated, they are rural residents of countries considered to be beyond hope. 

They are far from beyond hope.  They are expert practitioners of the industry that nourishes the world – agriculture.  But they are being marginalized.

Fifty-five percent of them are women who shoulder the double burden of farming and raising of children.  SSG considers them our friends.  We speak their language – farming.  We consult with them regularly regarding which seeds to produce, and where and how to market them. 

Their most immediate need is often simply more food, but in helping them to satisfy that need, we also help them unlock their most accessible economic opportunity – the marketing of surplus foods to urban populations.

We address the central issues facing the world’s most neglected people – hunger and poverty.  It has been known for decades that more efficient seed acts as a catalyst for a host of downstream advantages for farmers, and those seeds have been developed by well-funded research institutes.  Yet due to a classic case of market failure these farmers have never been given access to them.  SSG’s solution is not a project.  It is not charity.  It is a system-wide intervention involving agricultural scientists, policy-makers, entrepreneurs, and farmers which leaves behind a functional supply system for this life-giving technology.

Better-performing seed has always been the catalyst for productive, sustainable farming practices, but for decades, seed supply in Africa has been the domain of government agencies and the intermittent focus of non-governmental organizations.  Neither group focused on farmers’ real needs nor served them sustainably.  Multi-national seed companies likewise made forays into Africa, but their seed was too expensive and lacked diversity and local adaptation. 

SSG’s leaders took a risk and invested in local entrepreneurs who understood poor, smallholder farmers and saw the business opportunity, and who could be trained to produce and market high-quality seed at much lower prices.  Then they created links between public crop researchers and these local companies to deliver the latest products of crop research.  By providing operational funds for neglected crop scientists to do their work, we gained their trust and encouraged them to work with private sector.

We then went a step further and developed hundreds of village-based agro-dealers who own small shops selling seed and other inputs, and linked those to the seed companies.  We developed IT messages for farmers, conducted thousands of demos, and distributed hundreds of thousands of 50-gram sample packs so farmers could experiment with the seed at little risk. 

Once farmer awareness is established, it creates demand.  Assisting multiple companies to get established ensures healthy competition and offers farmers a choice.  As seed companies encounter policy-related hurdles to success at scale we advocate for better policies, and find that policy-makers are more responsive to local businesses’ needs than multi-nationals.

The opportunity to help African farmers achieve productivity comparable to the rest of the world has grown out of a long struggle to re-orient crop breeding away from an exclusive focus on yield maximization (which worked well in North America and Asia) to include selection for tolerance to Africa’s many biotic and a-biotic stress factors and rustic, rain-fed growing environments.  Several public crop breeding teams were funded to develop and combine traits for drought tolerance, disease resistance, and earlier maturity.  The result was a new generation of stress-tolerant, high-yielding varieties that could produce yields under smallholder farming conditions that were almost equal to those achieved by farmers in favorable environments, and had the taste, texture, and cooking traits preferred by African farmers.

A second major technological breakthrough was in hybridizing African crops which had only been available on the continent in non-hybrid forms, such as sorghum, millet, and maize.  For decades, conventional wisdom held that African farmers were uninterested or unable to cultivate hybrid varieties, and would not buy the seed.  This involved creating male and female parents which combine well, forming hybrids and testing them under marginal, stress-prone conditions.  Then, we marketed the new seed through locally-adapted communication channels, and sold it in small packages at prices even poor farmers could afford.  The result was demand for the new seed that seed companies could not keep up with.  Yields increased, and new markets formed around the creation of small surpluses by thousands of newly-productive farmers.

Improved crop varieties:

- make more efficient physiological use of light, nutrients, and water;

- increase partitioning of plant growth into the harvested portion;

- resist attacks by pests and diseases;

- tolerate moisture stress through deeper root systems, more efficient photosynthetic and respiratory pathways or earlier maturity.

They also assimilate increased protein and micro-nutrient through genetic bio-fortification.  All these improvements are possible through non-transgenic (“conventional”) plant breeding.  Other improvements in crops have been the removal of photo-period sensitivity, allowing crops to flower year-round, and the introgression of dwarfing genes which allow crops to produce more grain without toppling over in the field.

Modern seed business in Africa makes use of numerous technologies including drone technology for crop monitoring, seed processing technology, mobile payment transactions, text messaging, and rural radio messaging.  The net result of these technologies is that it is now easier to supply seed to millions of smallholder farmers in remote, rural locations than ever before. 

Specialized intervention in seed supply has taken place in 13 African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Ghana, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria.  In these countries, 121 private seed companies are producing approximately 150,000 metric tons of certified annually which is being sold via 19,000 agro-dealers.  Crop yields for most major staple crops and vegetables have increased in these countries. 

The success of this work has been documented in refereed publications and journals as well as the media:   https://knowledge4food.net/knowledge-portal-item/africa-agriculture-status-report-2019-hidden-middle/; https://www.nature.com/articles/nplants201414?proof=t; https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/03/12/a-green-evolution; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM_2FWzc3QU.

SSG currently serves the farmers of Benin, Chad, Eritrea, Togo, and the semi-arid regions of Kenya by testing improved varieties and multiplying seed for their eventual use.  The total farming populations of these countries is:

Benin – 1.3 million

Chad – 2.4 million

Eritrea – 0.7 million

Togo – 1.0 million

Kenya Semi-Arid – 1.0 million

Total – 6.4 million farm families.

On average, each farm family includes 5 members.  Hence, the total number of people SSG is working to assist at present is about 32 million.  However, the goal of our interventions over a period of five years is to increase the adoption of improved seed to 30%.  This gives a total number of direct beneficiaries of our work of 9.6 million.

We estimate that within one year we will have added two more countries to our portfolio, although it is impossible to say which countries this will include.  The average farmer population of SSG countries is 2 million, hence by adding two countries we expect to be serving an additional 20 million people.  The total number of direct beneficiaries at this stage will be 15.6 million.

Within five years SSG will have begun operations in all its 15 countries, with a total population of 323 million people, including 38 million farm families, or 190 million people.  By reaching our goal of 30% adoption of improved seed among these farm families we expect to have benefitted 57 million people.

Our goal for the next year is to introduce and test improved, climate-resilient seed into seven out of our 15 target countries, and to have assisted 10 private seed entrepreneurs in these countries to build fully-integrated seed supply operations.  Our interactions with agricultural leaders in these seven countries will have allowed us to consolidate with them a vision for strengthening both the public and private sides of the seed equation.  This will mean leveraging additional government support for crops research and seed quality control, as well as advancing one or several key policy issues for encouraging additional growth of the seed sector.

Within five years our goal is to be operational in 15 countries, with active variety testing and registration activities on-going in all countries, and 60 private, African seed companies in operation and growing year-on-year.  At this stage, we will also be approaching our target of 7,500 agro-dealers and will have engaged approximately 15,000 village-based advisors who are actively promoting sustainable intensification of farming in their communities.  At a national level, government leaders will likewise be actively supporting the continued development of a public-private model for seed systems, and additional, spill-in investment will be taking place.  Downstream effects of increasing crop harvests will begin to occur at this stage, with grain traders active across the most productive areas and countries beginning to express their comparative advantage for production of food products and building stronger, more dependable trade relations with neighboring countries and export markets.

It is likely that SSG’s level of activity will always be governed by financial issues, but these will be of our own choice.  Our goal is not to grow as large as possible, but to grow to a size which can be sustainably managed in relation to Africa and the world’s food needs.  At this stage, we believe that the point at which SSG can maintain maximum influence is 150 people.  Growing larger than this will, we believe, limit our internal growth as a family of practitioners and could lead to SSG displacing the efforts of others.  Likewise, our maximum level of financial resources for maintaining a healthy balance between resource management, technical assistance, and advocacy is approximately $20 million annually.

Over the coming year we expect to address technical barriers to the successful implementation of crop variety testing and seed production in seven countries.  This will involve learning about testing sites and analyzing data to identify those with the greatest relevance for farmers.  Seed companies will likewise be confronting technical issues with seed production and processing as part of their growth.  Farmers will be facing financial and cultural questions related to purchasing of seed which we will be addressing through our communications with village-based advisors and agro-dealers. 

Within five years, most of these issues will be settled, but seed markets will continue to ebb and flow based on national and regional grain markets.  Solutions for these barriers will reside at the level of government food policies.

Within any food system the barriers to achieving sustainability are varied and complex.  It is not the role of SSG to understand all of them adequately to revolve them, but rather to create the teams of people who can help countries address them in a constructive way that maximizes rapid learning, and then to convene discussions where they are presented and dealt with constructively.  We will do this by organizing discussion sessions (virtual or in-person, depending on travel policies) at a regional level, where practitioners can broadly gain an understanding for the main issues related seed systems development, and progress from there to discussions of stakeholders at national level, in a community-of-practice mode.  It is at the national level where specialists gain an appreciation for the role they play in a more productive and sustainable food system.

SSG operates on a five-year time horizon.  This is to allow people to adjust to a new paradigm wherein private sector is gaining a greater role in seed supply and food systems than it has previously occupied, and public sector is getting used to playing a more critical role for the functioning of private actors and farmers by registering new varieties and regulating seed quality.  It is also necessary for the individuals and groups involved to grow into an understanding that our job is not simply completing a development task, but to see it grow into a new national food economy involving thousands of people, new enterprises, and sometimes even new cross-border relations.

We are currently a full-time team of 10, and expect to grow to a full team of 30 over the next two years.  However, as SSG works through existing public and private institutions at national level, the number of people actively engaged in our work is much larger.  The approximate breakdown of people actively working on SSG-related tasks in our five-country program area is:

Full-time

Crop variety testing - 50

Seed production – 80

Part-time

Data analysis - 50

Seed inspection - 25

SSG is uniquely positioned to extend the benefits of improved, climate-resilient seed to farmers in left-behind countries of Africa because we first designed the strategy and then pioneered this work together in 13 African countries.  As developers of the public-private model for seed systems development, we have the best understanding of its capabilities, functional components, and the technical and political barriers we are likely to encounter in 15 new countries.  Our reputation as serious-minded, competent individuals, earned over the course of 10+ years of experience in the original 13 countries, as well as our track record for success, has preceded us in the 15 new countries, and allowed us to quickly establish functional relationships with agriculture ministers and researchers in each country.  Our experience with this work has given us a vision for bringing it to new groups of farmers.

We have designed our team to be broadly split between specialized financial and administration functions and scientific and technical functions.  Most of our team are fluent in both English and French, and several are trilingual, including proficiency in Portuguese, Swahili, Wolof, and Haussa.  All of our team members have traveled broadly across Africa in rugged conditions, and are at-home in rural settings with limited infrastructure and lodging.  We do this work because we believe in it, and love it.  This commitment has allowed SSG to develop a brand that translates effectively across many borders and allows us to achieve much more than any similar group, with less resources and time.

Seed Systems Group works with a rich and varied group of partners, including agricultural ministries, national agricultural research institutes, universities, private seed companies, farmer-based organizations, and non-governmental organizations.  At a continental level, we work with the African Union and the African Development Bank.  At both a regional and national level, we also work with member institutions of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), sub-regional agricultural research bodies (CORAF, ASARECA), and the African Seed Trade Association.  Our partners in strategy development are Cornell University and Sathguru Consulting of Hyderabad, India.  Our financial partners include AGRA, The Rockefeller Foundation, IDRC, and the Irish government.  We actively coordinate our work with USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Seed Systems Group’s business model is a technical and financial assistance group dedicated to strengthening the abilities of our collaborators in seed systems development in 15 left-behind countries of Africa.  Our aim is to establish functional, growing systems for supply of improved seed to smallholder farmers.  We measure our success through tangible outputs such as new crop varieties registered for production, graduates of university fellowships, tons of certified seed produced and sold, increased average grain crop yields, and increased farmer income.  We likewise track progress through passage of improved policies.  Our proxy goal for achieving food security in each country is to reach 30% adoption of improved seed nationally over the course of two, five-year phases of implementation, at which time we expect to leave behind a functioning seed system and a transformed food system, allowing SSG team members to focus on new countries with unmet food and nutrition needs.  Therefore, our exit strategy is built into everything we do. 

SSG is a team of crop scientists and financial and operations managers.  We are strong in the scientific, technical, and business management fields associated with seed systems, but not as strong in communications and IT.  Solve’s assistance in strengthening our external communications, including communications with farmers, seed producers, and researchers, as well as helping us to incorporate IT solutions into our data management systems, output tracking, and farmer outreach, would be greatly appreciated.

SSG’s goals draw from UN Millenium Goals and as such are broadly understood and endorsed.  Moreover, seed systems development is increasing accepted as the most plausible means for achieving food security in Africa over the long term.  However, the size of the task, and the methods for communicating it and tracking progress against its goals and objectives call for broad support systems to be directed at SSG and moreso the governments and private sector actors in the 15 left-behind countries.  We would greatly appreciate assistance in all ways that help us communicate our mission and allow us to reach more farmers. 

The SSG team would greatly appreciate the opportunity to partner with MIT faculty members, IT specialists, data managers and communications specialists.  In addition, Solve members with expertise in these or related fields would be welcome partners.  SSG’s team is an outward-looking group of people who are eager to join forces with like-minded individuals and teams.

Fifty-five percent of all farmers in SSG countries are women who have historically been prevented from accessing even the most basic improved technologies to do their work, and are some of the most deserving and vulnerable people in the world.  African women have also proved to be some of the most effective crop breeders and researchers.  African seed entrepreneurs, agro-dealers, and village-based advisors are likewise some of the best-placed and most effective actors in SSG’s communities of practice, and we actively seek out their expertise in all facets of our work.  Giving women at each of these levels of activity and responsibility a greater voice is a critical way of improving life and livelihoods in our 15 program countries.  We are eager to help link them to the Solve community and other opportunities.