CO-Nigeria Project Description

The project will consist of a partnership between CIMMYT, ICRISAT and Oxfam (Novib) focused on improving crop diversity for food security in West Africa. The partners plan to merge their experiences for strengthen key elements of the seed system for food security crops in a participatory manner, with a focus on community organization and business model assessments: The review process will focus on Mali and may include interested farmer organizations in Niger. It will focus on detailed understanding and documentation of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing forms of seed system innovations by farmer groups and organizations in Mali, as a basis for identifying entry points for targeted strengthening of existing efforts, and toguide the initiation of new village level efforts in northern Nigeria.

Activities
Thus, the planned review of ongoing farmer engagement in seed system innovations, harvesting and synthesizing of lessons will be geared towards:

1. Application and testing of lessons from Mali to a new contextin Northern Nigeria, where farmers organizations are less prominent, but village level cohesion can be mobilized. This adaptation process will provide learning experiences for scaling the model in new settings and cultural contexts.

2. Learnings about business models for farmer managed seed enterprises in fragile and humanitarian environments. The learning process will be structured in a waythat key actors for humanitarian assistance, local, national, and international active in the agricultural context, in each of the targeted countries, will become key stakeholders, who will have the opportunity to shape the learning process towards priority themes.

3. The identification of seed system as well as humanitarian aid actors for this process will be based on a stakeholder mapping process. An assessment of priority seed system development needs and learning opportunities will guide the priorities for the above described ‘learning agenda’ and the subsequent focus of the communication strategy. In this manner, a communication strategy will bedeveloped, that is based on sound understanding of actors’ priority interests and concerns and can be adapted as learnings advance.

4. The project team will identify learnings and communication products that can be of general benefit for wider distribution, using channels that are used by humanitarian aid as well seed system development practitioners.

5. Regular focus group discussions of project staff (physical andvirtual) with 10 village level farmer groups to prepare for and manage seed production in the growing season 2023, addressing agronomic issues concerning crop cultivation (e.g., access to water, soil maintenance), marketing issues (storage, packaging andlabelling, price setting, local and other markets) and legal context (national seed law), as well as safety issues impacting on farmer seed production and marketing.

6. Securing timely access to required quantities of input seed (starter seed/foundation seed/early-generation seed) for the village level organizations referred to above.

7. Supporting marketing intelligence operations of the village level organizations referred to above (visiting local markets, identifying seed prices of commercial providers, considering community role).

8. Identifying sustainability requirements regarding farmer seed production and marketing activities, considering gender and youth roles and interests in particular.

The specific role of Oxfam Novib and Country Offices in Mali and Nigeria will be further defined and depend upon approval of funding.