While many N2Africa staff in some countries, both in Africa and elsewhere, taking hard-earned vacations, others are in full swing of the cropping season. That’s the nature of such a broadly-based project as N2Africa – there are always exciting things happening. Fred Kanampiu and I have just returned from a visit to Tanzania with senior staff from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which we report on below.

Alan Duncan is stepping down from his role in N2Africa. Alan will move from Ethiopia to Scotland to pursue a range of research and science management activities at University of Strathclyde and Scotland’s Rural College while maintaining a link with ILRI. We are grateful to Alan for his wise counsel in his role in the N2Africa Leadership Team over the past years and in particular his very practical advice on interactions with livestock and on innovation platforms. We’ll miss his dry sense of humour!

What started as an agreeable brain storming session, has, over time become the ‘Bean Thinking’ campaign to inform smallholder farming household members about good practices in common bean farming.

N2Africa partnered with Women for Women in Kamituga (South Kivu, DRC). Together they offer the women from this region better opportunities in ‘business’ agriculture than they currently get from heavy work in the mines.

In my PhD research I assess whether the food requirements of rural households in Ghana match with the food they produce. Therefore I need to know how much and which food the household members need for a healthy diet, and how much and which food they produce on their farm. To see what food is needed for a healthy diet, together with a team of scientists, research assistants and students¹ I collected dietary intake data from 400 children between 6 months and 2 years old in Karaga district in Northern Ghana.

A new structure for the N2Africa intranet is online. Especially information on agronomy activities and data collection is now easier to find and access. Although only N2Africa staff can access the intranet, we also give others a look behind the scenes on how we structure and improve information flows in N2Africa.

"Partnership will address challenges facing farmers in the production and marketing of soyabean in the country"

An innovation platform that brings together all the stakeholders along soyabean value chain from farmers to government and non-government organizations and the private sector to address the challenges facing soyabean sector development in Tanzania was launched on 13 May 2015 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.