Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) Capacity Development and Technology Outreach (CDTO)

The Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) is a Programme under the “Feed Africa” strategy of the African Development Bank (AfDB). Under this Strategy, the TAAT programme aims to contribute to the transformation of agriculture and scaling up of agribusiness opportunities in nine key agricultural commodity value chains, namely: rice, cassava, wheat, sorghum/millet, maize, high iron beans, orange-fleshed sweet potato, small livestock and aquaculture. The TAAT contribution shall be through providing the needed, proven agricultural and food processing technologies and accompanying implementation strategies. It has been estimated that overall TAAT will lead to 120 million tons of additional raw food production per year and will contribute to lifting about 40 million people out of poverty. The principal implementation units of TAAT are Commodity Technology Delivery Compacts (CTDC). A CDTC is a platform of all actors in the seed, primary production, and primary processing components of an agricultural value chain. In addition to the CTDCs there are five enabler/ cross-cutting compacts, namely: policy, capacity development and technology outreach (CDTO), ENABLE-TAAT, water management, and fall armyworm. Implementation of the CDTO is managed by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) with its partners. This Group is intended to support socialised knowledge management activities of the CDTO. This will include sharing resources, news, stories and opportunities as well aiding members of the Group to ask questions to which community members can respond. The Group is embedded in the Virtual Social Networking Platform of the African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS) - a key Partner of FARA. The three main reasons for this are: 1. The first is to facilitate CTDCs to locate organisations and individuals that they can work with in their target countries; 2. To provide a virtual outreach route through which TAAT activities can spomteneously spill over to non-participating organisations and communities in the more that forty countries embraced by the AFAAS network; 3. To place the knowledge from the TAAT into a space where actors involved in providing agricultural extension and advisory services can continue to access it after the end of the Programme.