A group of passionate African and Indian agricultural stakeholders, united in their commitment to agricultural development, visited IITA-CGIAR on 3 October as part of activities outlined for the Global Okra Round Table II (GORT II) and 5F Farming Conference organized by the Foundation for Advanced Training in Plant Breeding (ATPBR), India, and National Horticultural Research Institute (NIHORT), Nigeria.
The delegates were received at the IITA Genetic Resources Center (GRC) conference room by Kenton Dashiell, IITA Deputy Director General, Partnerships for Delivery (DDG-P4D), and Zaina Sore, Head of the Capacity Development Office. They then had the chance to visit some IITA laboratories and interact with scientists and staff.
In his opening remarks, Dashiell emphasized IITA’s role as a primary research organization with significant engagements in delivery and scaling. He stressed that IITA, as a member of One CGIAR, has a mandate for certain crops but offers links to research and outputs for other crops through other CGIAR centers. He continued, “We welcome new partnerships in our research and delivery work.”
Dr Kottaram Narayanan, Director ATPBR, who was visiting IITA for the first time, expressed his pleasure at the institute’s reception. He identified that the team comprised a good mix of people from the private sector and academia and that a growing collaboration existed between them regarding quality research, strengthening start-ups, and entrepreneurship. They wanted to know how IITA helps smallholder farmers adopt research technologies.
IITA’s approach is collaboration, partnering with government, private, public, national, and academic institutions to deliver research products to end-users. Dashiell added, “Solving problems involves many partnerships to extend our good research to help countries and farmers have better production, more income, and a better life. For instance, we partner with the University of Ibadan to have graduate students conduct research for their degree programs here in IITA.”
Sore said, “The success of IITA comes from our partnership and research delivery arms working hand-in-hand. We work to ensure proven technologies reach the hands of the end-users through our Business Incubation Platform (BIP) and our Youth in Agribusiness arm. We engage the required partnerships selected along different commodity value chains, including those covered by other CGIAR centers.”
Speaking on IITA-CGIAR’s partnership with the African Development Bank in the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT), Dashiell said, “For many years, considering the limitations of government, private sectors, and extension workers, it has been a struggle to take the result of research to farmers. TAAT was a bold effort to engage all necessary actors to drive delivery of technologies to transform African agriculture.”
TAAT is a network of research institutions, governments, and private sector partners that deliver the best genetics, fertilizers, marketing channels, storage practices, and more to agricultural value chain actors. The model is already progressing well in delivering research technologies to farmers and other end-users. Dashiell revealed that the Asian Development Bank is partnering with the International Rice Research Institute to run a similar model in Asia.
Contributed by Folake Oduntan
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