Scaling up biocontrol innovations in Africa

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To ensure food security and sustainable livelihoods for a growing population, African agriculture needs to undergo transformational change to increase productivity and resilience to climate change and insect pests. The food system depends on production by millions of smallholder farmers and how to reach them and facilitate farm improvements is a generic challenge and a tremendous opportunity. Our cluster will explore how to improve on-farm innovation, focusing on the biocontrol of crop pests with safe, cheap and environmentally friendly improvements. We will identify the country-dependent context for the adoption of biocontrol innovations, their compatibility with other farming practices, and the potential to advocate for agricultural policy developments in this sector. We will identify the lessons learned where these innovations have been applied successfully and the country-dependent issues that prevent the upscaling of these biocontrol innovations. We will examine ways in which the innovations can be supported in relation to local, district and national agricultural practices and policies.The cluster will explore how to improve uptake of biocontrol practices by farmers and how to optimise knowledge exchange. The cluster will develop farmer-farmer networking and knowledge sharing, building on a successful model developed by NM-AIST, and explore how this can be enhanced using mobile phone technology. This foundation will help to define the research questions and programme of Stage 2.Project goals will be achieved through a synthesis of the current state of knowledge and understanding about biocontrol approaches, their success and limitations and by actively developing communication tools for knowledge exchange. To do this we will engage with farmers and other key stakeholders to co-design appropriate mechanisms for sharing information and empowering farmers. Crucially, we will, from the outset, involve the intended "end-user" in the development of our programme so that new approaches can be co-designed with those benefiting from our research outcomes. Success in delivery of new crop protection solutions is critically dependent on active engagement of potential users throughout the programme. Our project will explore how to gather information from many remote smallholder farms and how to target new technologies to places where they are of maximum benefit.