YARA Fertilizer and Kilimo Joint in new collaboration under ACAI to bring new partners to the project

Two ACAI project partners in Tanzania, YARA Fertilizers and Kilimo Joint have struck a collaboration that will see them engage secondary partners to scale and disseminate AKILIMO agronomy advice tools in the country.

The partnership has been developed after months of discussion between representatives of the institutions and ACAI team consisting of Fredrick Baijukya, ACAI project coordinator for Tanzania and Thompson Ogunsanmi, the project scaling specialist.

ACAI has adopted as part of the scaling strategy to engage secondary partners affiliated to the project’s primary partnership network. This will play a key role in ensuring fast dissemination and sustainability of use and application of AKILIMO tools beyond the lifespan of the ACAI project.

Using a vetting criterion agreed upon between ACAI and all project partners, Kilimo Joint and Yara identified 60 potential new partners for scaling and dissemination of AKILIMO agronomy advice tools. Out of the identified 60, Kilimo Joint indicated they have a working history with at least 20 of them.  These newly identified potential partners operate at different segments of the cassava value chain including production, processing, and marketing.

The potential secondary partners were selected by looking at their operational capacity in the cassava value chain in the country, trusted farmers in their networks, products and/or services, distribution channels and the ability to resolve farmers’ bottlenecks like access to inputs, market and credit.

ACAI has also integrated these criteria into the scaling checklist then follow up with the secondary partners to confirm their readiness to work with YARA and Kilimo joint. These partners will then be trained by the two companies under the auspices of ACAI project before they can start to disseminate some of the technologies to their farmers.