Africa Harvest has been working on tissue culture banana since 2002 and in that short span of time has been able to positively turn around the lives of thousands of Africa’s farmers who previously barely scrapped by on less than a dollar per day.

By harnessing cutting-edge science technologies, Africa Harvest has used its knowledge and experiences of the continent to successfully target the poorest farmers and uplift them socio-economically.

Africa Harvest’s life-changing science-for-development approach has been globally acclaimed and rewarded with numerous prestigious awards and prizes.

Most importantly, however, is the selection of the Africa Harvest’s banana tissue culture work, alongside other groundbreaking technologies of our time such as the New Rice for Africa (NERICA), as a model for how Africa can leverage agriculture for growth and development.

Africa Harvest’s tissue culture banana work has been selected by NEPAD, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, for replication in other parts of the continent. This will be done as part of NEPAD Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme that is implemented by the continental Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA).

Africa Harvest’s model of success helped Kenya to revive its banana production, which was in free fall in the first half of the 1990 due to an onslaught from diseases and pests. Africa Harvest harnessed the tissue culture technology and took it straight to farmers, closely training them how to best handle the new technology for increased production. Africa Harvest went the extra mile to ensure farmers also understood market dynamics, and could make the most of market opportunities in selling their surplus production.

This approach, called the whole value chain, carefully targets the most vulnerable groups of resource-poor small-scale farmers to provide them with holistic, empowering solutions ranging from accessing high quality technologies and being able to use them properly , to the most profitable markets where they can optimise their incomes.

In this way, Africa Harvest has turned around poor farmers’ fortunes in record time, and built in sustainability in its wake. Africa Harvest has proven that empowering, carefully targeted science can be effectively deployed beat hunger, malnutrition and poverty.