The sweetpotato conservation and utilization project of the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) has ended with the release of a concluding report in September. Among other things, the report highlighted innovative strategies that were employed to implement the project from 2019-2024. These strategies engaged families units and community groups in participatory sweetpotato breeding and conservation activities.
NARI’s Crop Improvement Scientist, Jeffrey Waki led the project. Waki said, “The project utilised the family farm teams (FFT) concept to initiate the project in order to realise the goal conserving sweetpotato crop diversity on the family gardens. Participating families were taken through four FFT modules that helped family members to agree on the need to conserve their local sweetpotato diversity among other important livelihood goals”.
He further explained that the modules also promoted gender-inclusivity and helped to raise awareness of the importance of fair distribution of socio-ecomomic resources among farming families.
The place-based model of the FFT training made it more relevant as it acknowledged low literacy levels of rural families. This helped them to easilyu embrace new ideas within the context of their daily lives, environment and culture.
By the end of the project, the family farm team participants at all the proejct sites demonstrated changes in their attitudes towards their individual roles as well as the importance of food and nutrition security in the families. They also assumed noble statuses as custodians of sweetpotato crop diversities and agents of change in their respective communities.
Other innovative approaches used in to roll out the project included participatory varietal selection; on-farm sweetpotato conservation and participatory (sweetpotato) varietal selection processes.
Identified family farm teams at the project sites were engaged in all of those undertakings. Families became agents through whom new sweetpotato cultivars were introduced to their communities through cultivation, evaluation and selection of the varieties that satisfied the traits they preferred
According to the report, training on participatory breeding and conservation of sweetpotato helped to up-skill local farmers with citizen science to actually generate and conserve new sweetpotato varieties on their own farms.
Four project site engaged were Rigwali in Central; Menyamya in Morobe; Usurufa in Eastern
Highlands, and Teptep in Madang province. Life-changing outcomes among farmers at these locations make give strategies employed the potential to be replicated in up future projects.
