The genocidal campaign and civil war flared most intensely during the first half of 1994, although instability continued for the next two years. It killed approximately 800,000 people and scattered another two million as refugees, or about a third of the total population.

As one of Africa's poorest countries, with about 90% of the population dependent on agriculture for a living, Rwanda had received steady attention from the CGIAR for more than a decade prior to the calamity. When the war began to subside, CIAT convened a consortium of eight CGIAR Centers, including itself, CIMMYT, CIP, ICRAF, ICRISAT, IITA, ILRI, and IPGRI. The Seeds of Hope (SOH) Initiative was formally launched in September 1995.

The national research institutions of Rwanda and its neighbors--Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zimbabwe— were vital SOH partners, along with some brave Rwandans from the Institut des Sciences Agronomiques du Rwanda (ISAR) and the Ministry of Agriculture, who continued to work despite extreme duress. The NARS (National Agricultural Research Systems) contributed through the crop improvement research networks they and the Centers had established previously: RESAPAC/ECABREN (East and Central African Bean Research Network) for beans, PRAPACE (Research Network on Potato and Sweetpotato in East and Central Africa) for potato and sweetpotato, and EARRNET (East African Root Crops Network) for cassava.

Involvement of non-governmental organizations was the third dimension of SOH partnership, especially CARE, World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Swiss Disaster Relief, and Medicins Sans Frontiers. They monitored developments on the ground as the war and postwar recovery progressed, identifying needy locations and delivering seed aid and technical support.

Development investors that made SOH possible included USAID, ODA (now DFID - UK), Swiss Development Corporation (SDC), IDRC (Canada), Australian Aid, and World Vision—all building upon the steady investments of CGIAR Members prior to and continuing through, and beyond SOH.

The CGIAR Centers helped Rwanda in four major ways:

1. Helping relief agencies find good quality seed of the right varieties that farmers and communities were asking for, avoiding the past pitfall of indiscriminate supplies of seed not well adapted to the target zone;
2. Studied changes in seed diversity and household seed security in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, to understand if and how precious biodiversity might have been damaged;
3. Multiplied seed of a wide range of indigenous Rwandan crop varieties outside the country, so as to be prepared to restore it on a major scale in case of total loss (fortunately, this worst-case scenario did not materialize, but those seeds did prove valuable in rebuilding Rwanda's research capacity); and
4. Helping rebuild human capacities, training those who replaced those who had been killed or forced to flee.

The watershed SOH case touches a number of issues discussed later in this monograph. Here we focus on emergency actions—items 1 and 3 above (see Buruchara et al. 2002 and Sperling 1997 for more detail).

It was unclear at the outset how the war would ultimately affect farmers and the poor; a number of scenarios had to be considered in SOH's planning. If crops in the field were lost, desperate hunger would ensue. Farm families might be forced to eat their seed stocks, creating a crisis for subsequent seasons.