Bulletin story Archives

ENABLE Youth Cameroon births first start-up

On 15 June, AgriBiz Home made history as the first start-up of the ENABLE Youth Cameroon program. At a ceremony chaired by the city of Penja Divisional Officer M. Abate, the start-up unveiled “Juicy”, its branded banana-based fruit juice, to the public. Cargèle Masso, IITA-Cameroon Country Representative and Coordinator of ENABLE Youth Cameroon, also attended…

Artificial intelligence: A game-changer for agriculture in Africa

CGIAR-IITA plant health scientist James Legg was a recent guest on Plantopia, a podcast series to mark the International Year of Plant Health, and interviewed by Cornell University’s David Gadoury. Legg talked about a powerful tool that is putting information in farmers’ hands. This tool is an app, PlantVillage , which was developed in partnership…

IITA to host One-Health webinar on climate-driven pests and diseases in West Africa

On Tuesday, 30 June 2020, CGIAR-IITA will host a webinar on climate-driven pests and diseases in West Africa under the “One-Health platform for climate-driven pests and diseases in West Africa”. The webinar will take place from 2 to 4 pm West African time. To advance agricultural and food systems, CGIAR instituted eight unique Regional Grand Challenges focusing…

IYA partners with Oyo State Government to resuscitate rural training center

IITA Youth Agripreneurs (IYA) is partnering with the Oyo State Government on revitalizing and using the Rural Community Development Centre (RCDC) in Awe, Afijio Local Government Area of Oyo town, as a satellite site for its youth-in-agribusiness related activities. IYA proposed that the RCDC, which is located about 56 kilometers from Ibadan, be used for…

ACAI partner establishes 492 training plots for scaling AKILIMO

The Tanzania Food and Nutrition Centre (TFNC), a primary partner of the Africa Cassava Agronomy Initiative (ACAI), has established and planted 492 validation trial sites for AKILIMO. Also, TFNC set up 46 demonstration sites across the ecological zones covered by ACAI. Planting took place between October 2019 and April 2020 because of the varying ecological…

Paper on using genome-editing tools to develop climate-smart banana varieties among the top-most downloaded

While banana is an important staple crop feeding more than 500 million people in the tropical and subtropical countries, its production is negatively affected by a myriad of factors including diseases and pests, declining soil fertility, and climate change. Efforts to develop improved disease resistant and drought tolerant banana varieties are, however, slowed down by…

IITA and Mastercard Foundation to implement Young Africa Works in Nigeria

The Youth in Agribusiness office of CGIAR-IITA is partnering with the Mastercard Foundation in Nigeria to implement the Young Africa Works strategy. A joint media release on 16 June formally announcing this collaborative effort said that the partnership aims to enable 242,724 young Nigerian women and men to build skills and secure dignified and fulfilling…

IITA Cameroon lends a helping hand to farmers’ coop at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic

Cameroon, like other countries in the world, is at the moment grappling with the effect of the coronavirus, having recorded over 6,000 cases so far. Despite the ravaging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, IITA-Cameroon has collaborated with the Technical Center for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) to give a helping hand to members of some…

Tanzania: Postharvest innovations key to raising youth involvement in horticulture

Horticulture is a field of agriculture that involves a short growing season averaging three months and offers quick yields and returns on investments despite the high rate of postharvest losses. In Tanzania, with the Government-initiated National Strategy for Youth Involvement in Agriculture (NYSIA) for 2016–2021, horticulture is one viable option that would give Tanzanian youth…

Development partners meet to address Africa’s food security amid COVID-19

In 2018, over 200 million people in Africa were undernourished due to food shortages. The advent of coronavirus has added another dimension to this issue. An examination of these problems led to the World Bank and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) convening a virtual conference to put together a response plan to address…