Motivation to Process OFSP; Constraints faced; and Who Needs to be Involved-Partnerships and Co-investment

Roles Played in Linking Farmers to Markets; The Major Lessons Learned Along the Implementation Process; Opportunities that Exist Currently; and Partnerships and Co-investment

Opportunities and Constraints that exist currently at the country level or regionally for value addition/manufacturing by SMEs?

Linking OFSP farmers to the market

The Monitoring, Leaning and Evaluation CoP meeting was held in Nairobi, on February 18, to assess progress made in using the MLE Manual since its launch and to discuss the successes and challenges encountered in using it for M&E data collection. Unlike previously, the 2018 meeting was held for only one day to provide more time for Stata training that followed immediately, and that was aimed at harmonizing the analysis of indicator and other M&E data. Presentations included use of the manual for collection of: baseline and endline survey data in Ethiopia and Tanzania, respectively; vine dissemination data in Kenya and Rwanda; DVM registration and monitoring in Burkina Faso; and the use Open Data Kit for baseline and monitoring surveys in Mozambique and Rwanda. The advantages of the manual were presented, challenges highlighted and opportunities for improvement of the tool to resolve the remaining challenges discussed

Significant progress was made in terms of beneficiaries reached with improved sweetpotato vines during this update period. More than 1 million direct and indirect beneficiaries were reached, with majority being in Tanzania and Uganda, countries where Farm Concern International has a large-scale dissemination and outreach program under its SeFaMaCo project. These countries accounted for more than one-half of the beneficiaries reached during this update period, with the SeFaMaCo project continuing to lead the rest of the sweetpotato projects in the SPHI platform in terms of number of households reached. Rwanda and Mozambique also showed strong progress in dissemination and ranked 3rd and 4th in terms of direct and indirect households reached. Cumulatively, more than 5.3 million households have been reached to date, representing 53% of the targeted 10 million households to be reached by 2020. This translates to a cumulative number of more than 25 million individual beneficiaries reached to date since 2009.
In terms of progress in the breeding and release of improved sweetpotato varieties, a total of 14 varieties were released by 4 countries namely, Ghana and Nigeria which are in the West Africa breeding platform, Uganda in the Eastern and Central Africa breeding platform and Malawi in the Southern Africa breeding platform. Among releases, seven were bred in-country while three (released in Malawi) were selected from seed generated by the CIP population development program in Uganda. Five of the released varieties were orange-fleshed; one was purple-fleshed; one was dark yellow-fleshed and seven were cream-fleshed. Six varieties were released from the West Africa platform, making it the leading in terms of variety releases during this update period.