Mpoko Bokanga, Executive Director, African Agricultural Technology Foundation

ABSTRACT

In the past 25 years, crop yields have been increasing in all regions of the world except in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where they have actually been dropping. It is imperative that this trend be reversed if the majority of the people of SSA who are dependent on agriculture for their livelihood are to avoid severe poverty and increased vulnerability to malnutrition, diseases, famine and social conflicts. Efforts to reverse this trend must make use of productivity-enhancing agricultural technologies, many of which are held in private hands outside Africa.

Innovative partnerships need to be established between public and private technology owners and public and private development institutions in order to put at the disposal of resource poor farmers in SSA the technologies needed to increase their productivity and enhance their income generating capacity.

One such partnership is the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF). It is an innovative African initiative designed to establish effective mechanisms for negotiating the access and transfer of proprietary and other technologies held by the public and private sectors anywhere in the world and creating appropriate long-term networks to manage the deployment of these technologies at all stages of the value chain. The AATF concept and its startup project portfolio will be described to illustrate this new type of public-private partnership focusing on bringing technological solutions to the problems facing resource poor farmers in SSA.

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