Delivering new technologies to the Tanzanian sweetpotato crop through its informal seed systemThe concept of integrated seed sector development (ISSD) to-type. Tanzania has the second biggest production (3.0 x 10 6 MT) in Africa after Nigeria (3.4 x 10 6 MT). Sweetpotato is the third largest crop by weight (FAOSTAT 2014) and the Great Lakes region is a major area of production where, as throughout Africa, the crop is especially important to smallholders (Kapinga et al. 1995). There is a very long dry season there, crops being harvested as they reach maturity and to avoid loss through desiccation and weevil damage, so most farmers have no vines to plant when the rains come. Consequently, insufficient quality planting material at the start of the rainy season is a prime constraint on production there (Kapinga et al. 1995;Namanda et al. 2011) as in many African countries Gibson et al. 2009). In the informal seed system of sweetpotato, farmers with access to wetlands or land that can be irrigated and the 'skills, talent and gumption' Promoting such changes through interventions aimed at multipliers would require fewer resources, be self-maintaining and more sustainable than interventions aimed at sweetpotato farmers in general. It would also be consistent with the ISSD approach. The purpose of this paper is to describe the range and capacity of the informal sweetpotato seed system to supply vines sustainably to large numbers of farmers in Shinyanga and Meatu districts of the Lake Zone of Tanzania and then to document how the formal sector can supply improvements to it, using small demonstration trials to introduce improved technologies such as: fertilizer to boost vine production; modern cultivars including OFSP; RMT including more efficient irrigation.Furthermore, the paper assesses transporting vines from an area where they are easy to grow to sell them in Shinyanga and nearby markets. This longer-distance marketing is a strategy learnt from Uganda (Rachkara et al. 2015), can supplement vines from local multipliers' farms and provide a more comprehensive service. In documenting outcomes, this paper serves as one of the first evidence-based demonstrations that the ISSD approach can deliver improvements efficiently to the informal sector. In this case, delivery of the technologies was by members of a Tanzanian government agricultural research institute, the Agricultural Research Institute (ARI)-Ukiriguru, part of the Lake Zone Agricultural Research and Development Institute (LZARDI). The work is an outcome of many years of experiences by the authors and their institutes to develop a successful strategy for interacting with the sweetpotato vine supply system in order to achieve lasting improvements.
The absence of formal institutions regulating water resources indicated a need to examine how informal governance works in semi-arid areas of the Lake Zone of Tanzania. Ostrom’s theory of common property resources was adapted to develop a questionnaire administered to 162 households using five different water sources (lake/dam, ponds near lake/dam, ponds, wells and waterholes) along with focus group discussions (6), key informant interviews (33) and field observations. The results indicated that communities do not have water management systems where water is abundant (lake/dam and ponds near these water sources). Conversely, where water is scarce (ponds, wells and water holes), communal water management occurs. However, such communal water governances are location specific and limited and, though they appear to function well at preventing water exhaustion, they fail to resolve the complex social dilemmas in that ecological system. Thus, most water resources are dominated by households with sound economic resource base, they take deliberate efforts to establish private wells in wetlands to intercept underground resources, raising issues of equity, contamination of underground water resources and human safety. Sandy river beds seemed to represent the worst ‘tragedy’ of unmanaged common resources, often being located in ‘no-man’s land’ between districts or regions, with uncontrolled competition resulting in enormous water holes dug by local resource users from both sides, and exhaustion by those with the deepest waterholes and access to engine-driven pumps. There are two water main crises: (1) too little is available to meet the current demand during an annual prolonged dry season (6-7 months) and (2) increasing social dilemmas on how to manage the little available. How external interventions could address these issues is discussed.
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