Extending Orange-fleshed Sweetpotato Availability for Vulnerable Households through Good Agricultural Practices and Post-Harvest Storage
Key Project Information
This is a one-year project funded by USAID-OFDA. The project period is from 1st July 2017 to 30th June 2018. All experience to date on storage of sweetpotato, emphasizes the need for attention to production management (particularly with respect to seed, fertility, and pests), careful harvesting and postharvest management (curing) to ensure successful storage to realize the full potential OFSP has to offer. The proposed intervention, sand storage, will build on previous efforts and findings from the USAID-OFDA project in the period of 2013-2015. We will continue to address the challenges of improving the shelf life of sweetpotato, and of identifying effective approaches to broadly disseminate (scale out) these methods so that vulnerable populations can improve nutrition, food security, and incomes with resilient, nutritious OFSP. We anticipate that with a combination of production and handling practices and with the right variety, shelf life of OFSP for home consumption may be doubled by extending to four months, while reducing losses due to rots, desiccation, and weevil infestation by 50% compared to open stored sweetpotato. The project has two objectives in the Improving Agricultural Production/Food Security Sub-Sector and one in the Seed System Security Sub-Sector. We are considering: (1) Double-S (storage in sand for consumption or sale) to scale, testing two different scaling approaches (demonstration at field and market; and through radio); (2) adapting and evaluating the stepped pit storage method developed in Malawi into the Ghanaian setting; and (3) evaluating the Triple-S (storage in sand and sprouting for seed) method of planting material production in Ghana.