Program Quality

EARO/ CARO – Sweet potatoes in Tanzania and Rwanda

On October 15^th, at the World Food Prize Symposium in Iowa, Bill Gates announced funding for the $21,250,000 Sweet potato Action for Security and Health in Africa (SASHA) project, led by the International Potato Center (CIP). SASHA was launched officially a few days later as part of the broader Sweetpotato for Profit and Health Initiative (SPHI) at the National Crops Resources Research Institute (NaCRRI) in Namulonge, Uganda. The SASHA project seeks to directly improve the food security and livelihoods of at least 150,000 families in Sub-Saharan Africa in five years and provide the evidence base for effective delivery systems to reach many more. Moreover, given widespread, informal farmer-to-farmer sharing of vines for planting, the number of direct plus indirect beneficiaries is likely to exceed 1 million families. As part of the broader, long-term, multi-donor, it is expected that the SASHA project will set the groundwork for improving the lives of 10 million Sub-Saharan households in 10 years. CRS is a sub-grantee in Tanzania (from year one) and Rwanda (from year two) and will receive approximately $900,000 over the five-year project.

The purpose of the SASHA project in Tanzania is to support the establishment and operation of a sweetpotato seed supply system as an add-on to an existing cassava system to improve the quantity and quality of food in 200,000 Tanzanian households and demonstrate the effectiveness, gender-sensitive scalability and sustainability of the system. The SASHA project will extend an existing voucher-based seed system for cassava in the Lake Zone to sweetpotato. CRS is disseminating cassava planting material in the Lake Zone through the Great Lakes Cassava Initiative (GLCI). The dramatic increase in the importance of Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD) is seriously affecting the availability of this basic staple, and therefore distribution of sweetpotato vines will contribute to meeting the growing energy deficit.

In Rwanda, the SASHA project has two objectives: (1) to compare the farmer welfare outcomes from the introduction of two models for producing sweetpotato flour, one where intermediate chips are produced by farmer groups and the other where the flour producer (and bakery) does all the processing, and (2) to test different models for inclusion of the poor and women in the development of new market chains for high value sweetpotato products. These objectives sit within the larger development question of how the poor, and particularly women, can capture the benefits of increased commercialization of staple crops such as sweetpotato. CRS will either work with existing farmer groups/cooperatives or will form new groups around three central activities: (1) root production, (2) vine production of new varieties, and (3) processing (fresh roots for the high end market, chipping and drying capacity, or boiling and mashing depending on findings of previous feasibility and market demand surveys).

For more information, please contact Malone Miller for Tanzania (mmiller@tz.earo.crs.org) or Sylvain Hakizimana for Rwanda (shakizimana@rw.caro.crs.org)

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