Agricultural development is not easy under any circumstances but least of all in a place like Central Africa’s Great Lakes Region, which is struggling to recover from decades of brutal conflict. Yet, rural people working in these conditions can register rapid and substantial gains, as demonstrated forcefully by a collaborative initiative that binds together CIAT, two other CGIAR Centers, and numerous local partners.
A midterm review in 2010 singled out several features of this project – called the Consortium for Improving Agriculture-based Livelihoods in Central Africa (CIALCA) – that mainly account for its success. These are the openness of the project’s partnership, its integrated approach to research on multiple cropping systems, its contagious participatory style of development, and its much-appreciated commitment to sharing knowledge and strengthening local capacity.
The particular way in which CIALCA combines these ingredients has resulted from a growing recognition of the need for collective action in agricultural research for development. In response to a call for project proposals from the Belgian government, Bioversity International, CIAT’s Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility (TSBF) Institute and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) each sent a submission but then “agreed to operate as one,” as the midterm review put it, to achieve greater efficiency and synergy.
CIALCA clearly prefigures the new way of working called for by recent reforms in the CGIAR. Operating in a total of 10 areas of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda, the project has advanced on many fronts all at once and in a remarkably short time.
During its first phase (2006–08), CIALCA worked with some 4,000 rural households to evaluate a wide range of options for raising crop yields, restoring soil fertility, and enhancing the resilience of diverse agricultural systems. The products of this work include improved crop varieties, simple techniques for mass propagation of banana and other species, a cassava–legume system that triples the yields of legumes and doubles those of cassava, measures for managing plant diseases and pests, soybean processing methods, and techniques for reducing soil erosion.
In connection with this work, the project is supporting 20 BSc, 19 MSc, and 18 PhD students, representing a major contribution to the reconstruction of regional research capacity. At the same time, CIALCA has begun to address other issues on which agricultural transformation depends, such as farmers’ links with output and input markets, their access to credit, and the health and nutrition of rural families.
As the development of new technologies and services continues in a second phase, the project is scaling out interventions identified in phase 1 through active engagement with a growing number of national and civil-society partners. This involves large-scale training for technicians and members of farmer associations, in which 60% of the participants are women.
CIALCA has thus transformed itself from a specific project with its own objectives into a broad platform for rural development involving numerous agricultural systems and services, various donors, and many other actors. A new knowledge resource center being established with support from the German government will provide a critical focal point for sharing research results more widely and opening up new pathways to impact.
Photo credit: CIAT
This post is part of our series celebrating “40 years of CGIAR”