The Technical program implements projects that offer both short and long term solutions to farmers and policy makers in Africa. It addresses the short-term practical solutions to the everyday challenges facing Africa’s small-scale farmers such as access to high quality planting materials, and access to markets to sell surplus produce. Africa Harvest’s longer-term activities contribute to sustainable development at the national and continental scale. Both the short and long-term activities are geared at addressing hunger, poverty and malnutrition.

Africa Harvest’s has two flagship research-for-development programs focusing on improving farmer access to high quality banana planting materials and production of more nutritious sorghum for Africa. 

The banana project, which has been on-going for about ten years, is focused on providing farmers with disease-free planting materials using the tissue culture technique. The impacts of tissue culture banana on rural farm livelihoods in Kenya alone, have won global accolades, clearly demonstrating the power of science and technology to transform farmers’ lives.  

Africa Harvest is also developing Africa’s capacity to correctly identify, catalogue and therefore respond to new threats to Africa’s banana production using the virus indexing technology. This technology will help control diseases such as the devastating banana bunchy top viral disease reported to be fast spreading in several countries in central and southern Africa in 2009.
The sorghum project is working at enhancing the nutritional quality of sorghum, another important African staple crop. Africa Harvest together with a rich array of partners and stakeholders are working to enrich the nutritional value of sorghum using the bio-fortification technique in what has come to be known as the Africa Bio-fortified Sorghum project.