Empowering Rwandan researchers with Ethiopian expertise
Through structured South–South cooperation, Rwandan researchers gained the skills and institutional capacity to generate site-specific fertilizer recommendations for beans.
Key result story taken from our 2025 annual technical report.
An Accelerator-brokered collaboration between Rwanda’s Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board (RAB) and Ethiopia’s Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), convening multiple CGIAR Centers, the Rwanda Space Agency, and Ministry partners, enabled RAB researchers to develop the analytical skills and institutional frameworks needed to produce site-specific fertilizer advisories.
Rwanda’s agricultural sector supports roughly 70 percent of the population, but crop productivity has been constrained by generalized fertilizer recommendations that do not reflect diverse soils, agro-ecological zones, or management conditions. For staple legumes such as beans, blanket recommendations have led to suboptimal yields, inefficient nutrient use, and limited returns for farmers.
Within Rwanda’s national agricultural research system, the technical and institutional capacity to generate sitespecific recommendations was fragmented: critical soil and crop data were scattered across individual computers, coordination between teams was limited, and expertise in data management and analytical workflows was concentrated in very few staff. Without integration and coordination, the potential of existing trial data remained untapped, and the system was vulnerable to disruption whenever trained staff left the institution.
The pilot, funded by the Gates Foundation and implemented through the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, aimed to strengthen Rwanda’s national capacity to generate and apply site-specific fertilizer recommendations as part of its integrated soil fertility management strategy. Rather than delivering a finished technical product, the pilot's design placed RAB in the lead, with CGIAR organizing its expertise and networks to respond to country-defined priorities.
The breakthrough emerged through structured South–South cooperation. Ethiopia’s Institute of Agricultural Research had operationalized a national decision-support tool for fertilizer recommendations, validated across extensive field sites. In July 2025, the Accelerator convened a two-day workshop in Kigali, bringing together RAB leadership, Ethiopian researchers, CGIAR staff, and Ministry partners to jointly diagnose Rwanda’s bottlenecks and co-design a collaboration framework. The workshop produced a six-month action plan with clear responsibilities, mentoring arrangements, and a roadmap for sustainability.
By learning directly from Ethiopia via Capacity Sharing, our team gained confidence and practical skills to make use of soil information and improve fertilizer planning across Rwanda.
Dr. Florence Uwamahoro, Director General, Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board (RAB)
Between September and October 2025, a nine-day hands-on training in Kigali, co-facilitated by an Alliance scientist and an EIAR researcher, equipped 36 RAB researchers in data management, geospatial analysis, machine learning, and decision-support tool development. Participants worked with Rwanda’s own bean trial data, covering over 1,500 field observations, progressing from data cleaning to generating spatially explicit fertilizer recommendations under multiple climate scenarios.
The training produced Rwanda’s first machine learning-based, site-specific fertilizer recommendations for beans, generated by national experts using national data. Crucially, RAB is now applying these analytical skills to other crops, maintaining ongoing collaboration with Ethiopian scientists to troubleshoot and refine models. This demonstrates that the learning is not limited to the initial workshop but is sustained, applied, and scaling within the institution.
The engagement also strengthened institutional capacity: RAB scientists are now organized around integrated workflows, with clearer processes for data management and tool development. The pilot created lasting connections between Rwanda and Ethiopia, establishing a network that supports long-term collaboration and system-level capacity building. These capabilities are now positioned to expand across multiple crops and integrate additional soil and spatial data, including from the Rwanda Space Agency, to enhance national fertilizer advisory systems.
Beyond the immediate results in Rwanda, the Accelerator is capturing how structured South–South cooperation works in practice. The key findings and engagement mechanisms — how CGIAR acts as a partner, broker, and connector between countries — are being systematically documented. These lessons, currently being written up, will feed into the Innovation Lab, which will analyze them to produce evidence, best practices, and guidance for future South–South cooperation. As such, the Accelerator is helping the broader system understand how to connect countries, align expertise, and support country-led innovation at scale.
Contributing Center: Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT Contributing external partner(s): Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board (RAB); Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR)