TAAT Technology toolkits and their strategic deployment: <i>TAAT Clearinghouse technical report series 001</i>
Creators: name: Woomer, Paul
name: Welissa Mulei
name: Zozo, Rachel
name: TAAT Clearinghouse
Publisher: name: Gates Open Research
Year: 2021

description: The African Development Bank recently launched Feed Africa: A Strategy for Agricultural Transformation in Africa. This loan program is intended to unlock Africa’s agricultural potential and boost job creation with a view to diversifying African economies and to better meet the Sustainable Development Goals related to poverty reduction and ending hunger and malnutrition. Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) is a flagship program within the Feed Africa Strategy aimed at modernizing African agriculture through the advancement of agricultural technology in a way that improves the business of agriculture across Africa, thus raising agricultural productivity, mitigating risks, and promoting sustainable enterprise diversification. To achieve these goals, TAAT focuses upon the identification, promotion and dissemination of proven technologies and management innovations. It is led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and structured as a series of Value Chain Compacts, each with its own Technology Toolkits, impact targets, and partnership arrangements.<br> <br> The TAAT Clearinghouse was established in Cotonou, Benin to oversee technology selection and to coordinate efforts between Compacts and across Africa. The Program Management Unit operates at IITA to ensure timely technical and financial reporting. TAAT presently operates in 31 African countries. The principle of designing and deploying Technology Toolkits is established within the framework of TAAT as a mechanism to extend cohorts of proven technologies to African farmers. Toolkits are defined as "an assemblage of proven core technologies needed to close productivity gaps that are mobilized during country-level technology deployment but then interpreted and advanced in a wider developmental context”. They are necessarily holistic. For example, improved crop varieties alone are not able in themselves to increase yields without accompanying technologies related to soil fertility, pest control, and water management. The same holds true for animal breeds without veterinary services and improved feed systems. Toolkit composition begins with proven production inputs and management innovations but also operates along the entire commodity value chain in a transformative manner.<br> <br> These toolkits provide the capacity for farmers to double yields, achieve food and nutritional security, increase farm household incomes above poverty levels, create employment and build agricultural exports. For crop enterprises, these toolkits include improved varieties and their seed systems; land preparation; management of nutrients, water, weeds, pests, and diseases; labor-saving and ergonomic tools and machinery; harvest and post-harvest operations; and processing and marketing opportunities. For animal enterprises, they include stock improvement and rearing; containment and housing; feed and health systems; harvest, processing, and marketing operations; and integration into larger farming systems and landscapes. The following is a summary of these Technology Toolkits followed by their deployment strategy and implications within the wider TAAT and Feed Africa Programs. While each toolkit is presented as a dissemination product of the nine TAAT Commodity Value Chains, it must be noted that their more precise composition varies within different partnership arrangements and that various TAAT Enablers also contribute to their design and implementation as specialized service providers.<br> <br> The Technology Toolkits described in this report are being developed, adapted, and deployed by their respective Commodity Value Chain Compact partnerships. Award of these Compacts resulted from a careful vetting process by IITA that first considered numerous technologies and identified which were worthy and ready for scaling. At the same time, The African Development Bank announced its intention to form TAAT as a technology backstopping flagship to its Feed Africa loan program among Regional Member Countries and conducted investigation missions to learn the expectations of such a facility. Then selected lead institutes were offered the opportunity to develop a Compact application for submission to the TAAT Clearinghouse following a standard template developed by the TAAT Program Management Unit and these applications were submitted to it. The Clearinghouse then commissioned both in-house and external reviews of these applications and forwarded its recommendations to the TAAT Program Steering Committee (PSC). The PSC either approved the Compact applications for funding or placed conditions upon their revision. In all, 15 Compacts were commissioned: nine relating to Commodity Value Chains and six providing Enabler backstopping services. It is these Commodity Value Chains that then prepared the more generalized Technology Toolkits described in this report and went on to adapt and deploy them at country levels through a series of implementation workshops and site-specific partnership actions.<br> <br> Countries selected for toolkit deployment were identified in the Commodity Value Chain Compact applications, and in some cases were recommended through Clearinghouse and PSC review, based upon which ones are best suited to host which Compacts. In some cases, Compact activities were clearly defined by agro-ecological conditions, as with the Sorghum and Millet Compact and its importance across the Sahel. In other cases, it was largely determined by the need to reduce massive food imports of staple commodities, particularly rice and wheat, and which countries are best positioned to join in that effort. Considerations for nutritional security through accelerated deployment of recently-development biofortified crops, particularly Orange-Fleshed Sweet Potato and High Iron Beans, were also factored into country selection. The net result was the establishment of 86 toolkit interventions in 27 African countries in 2018-2019. The effectiveness of Compact operations and the performance of their toolkits will undergo continuous Monitoring and Evaluation by the TAAT Clearinghouse, and this will become the topic of a future Clearinghouse Technical Report.<br> <br> <b>Technology Toolkits as Unifying and Ongoing Processes</b><br> Toolkits and their widespread adoption provide the basis for transforming African agriculture through TAAT. The central feature of these toolkits is the assemblage of input products and equipment needed to modernize African agriculture and the commercial linkages that ensure their availability and cost-effectiveness to farmers. Toolkits also must consider the farm management innovations that allow for the adoption of these products. Toolkits cannot be mobilized without the formation of multi-stakeholder teams that deploy, promote, and adapt them to site-specific farming and input delivery conditions. Clearly, a distinction must be made between the "generic" toolkits developed by Compact leaders, and the further refined toolkits intended for site-specific intervention through multi-stakeholder partnership. This report focuses upon the former, but with mention of an adaptive response to modernized maize-bean production in western Kenya. Finally, wider advocacy campaigns are needed that raise awareness of these transformational technologies and build larger commitments toward them, TAAT’s so-called Enabling Environment, but this has not been considered within this report. To a large extent, these toolkits form the bridging mechanism between TAAT Program operations and the agricultural development agendas of other organizations, particularly the recently established African Development Bank Feed Africa loan program. They also shape the collaboration with the private sector as input manufacturers, distributors, and agro-industrial food processors. They provide the substance for partnering agricultural extension activities at national levels, and their promotion offers direct incentives to farmer organizations and commodity producers to work with the individual Value Chain Compacts at local levels. In this way, these toolkits span all aspects of the TAAT Program as their composition and advocacy require an Enabling Environment, their widespread mobilization relates to Regional Technology Delivery Infrastructure, and their refinement and local adoption are the main goals of Commodity Technology Delivery.<br> <br> However, this approach is not without challenges and shortcomings. The toolkit concept was included late in the TAAT conceptualization process and has not been fully understood and embraced by some Value Chain Compact teams. Two tendencies run contrary to the fullest development of TAATs toolkits: “ivory tower perspective” and “silver bullet approaches". The former is exhibited by partnership cliques that fail to recognize the important contributions of alternative technologies that were developed by "outsiders" and are beyond their immediate control. This shortcoming results in less potent toolkits advanced within more confined networks formed prior to the establishment of TAAT itself. The latter “silver bullet approaches" result when Compact activities focus primarily upon a single emergent technology rather than including the accompanying technologies necessary to realize their larger objectives. This case appears for example when campaigns advancing improved crop varieties are conducted that do not include the fertilizer, weed control, and pest management technologies ensuring their success. It also results in skewed alliance to NARES and the private sector where national seed programs and seed companies are viewed as more important than the agro-dealer networks that serve as "last mile" suppliers of balanced input products composing the toolkits themselves.<br> <br> In fairness, TAAT is a new approach, its Compact leaders were encouraged to quickly assemble their technical and institutional resources, and standard guidelines were not issued on how they could best proceed with toolkit design. The consequences of this pragmatic strategy require the immediate attention of TAAT's Monitoring and Evaluation team and corrective interpretation by TAAT's leaders and sponsors.<br> <br> The Clearinghouse is responsible for assembling these toolkits into portfolios for wider incorporation into agricultural development agendas. These portfolios are intended for all TAAT partners so that our technologies may be more readily understood and accessed, and to become incorporated into Africa's wider rural development agenda. Not included in detail within this report are TAAT Enablers and their Compacts that provide backstopping specialist services to the Commodity Value Chain Compacts. These Enablers include Capacity Development, Youth Empowerment, Policy Support, Water Management, and Input Mobilization. Enablers are not intended to produce their own toolkits, but rather to contribute to the formation implementation, and promotion of those of their commodity counterparts. An exception to this directive is the Fall Army Worm Emergency Response that is closely related to the Maize Compact and has developed its own Rapid Response toolkit presented earlier in this report. Technology Toolkits represent the unifying embodiment of TAAT as their strategic formulation and widespread adoption at site-specific levels propels agricultural transformation. Ultimately these tested country-level toolkits are intended for incorporation into much larger Feed Africa loan projects to Regional Member Countries under development by the African Development Bank, so it is important that they be advanced in an understandable, business-like, timely, and adoptable manner!