Mr Reuben leading the field visit. Photo by Sarah Sallau.
The Head of IITA Kano Station, Alpha Y. Kamara and some senior staff of the station received the delegation, which was led by Dr Alassan Maiga, a Malian and Mr Mani Mamman, a Nigerien.
In his opening remarks, Kamara stated that the aim of agricultural technologies when developed is to create impact and should not to be kept on the shelf. In his brief presentation titled ‘”Key Approach to Scaling up Agricultural Technology to Increase Productivity and Income”, he highlighted key elements to use in scaling out technologies for high impact. These include effective partnership, use of scalable technologies, use of decision support tools to target suitable ecologies for the technologies, awareness creation, field demonstrations, capacity building of users, and use of market linkages to create demand.
He concluded the presentation by encouraging the project team and partners to always send their financial and technical reports on time to avoid late release of funds and to adhere strictly to the agreement in the implementation of the project activities.
In his remarks, Mr Tofa Abdullahi gave a report on his field visit to Mali and Niger Republic in September 2019. He disclosed the successes and failures of the implementation of the projects in some regions of both countries with particular reference to Kaye in Mali and Dosso in Niger where the NGOs did not do their work properly. He said the team must have learned from their past mistakes and admonished them to consolidate on the achievements made so far.
The visiting team showed excitement about the dynamism in the strategy used by IITA Kano in technology dissemination that improves smallholder farmers’ agricultural productivity. On their part, they highlighted some of the challenges and difficulties they have encountered in marketing soybean in the two countries. They proffered solutions to some of the problems such as training of households in the processing and utilization of soybean to create demand for the crop.
Alpha Y. Kamara addressing the visiting team.
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