The Sasakawa Africa Association（SAA）and HarvestPlus, a program of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), has entered into a partnership agreement through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which aims to scale up nutrition sensitive Agriculture in Africa through promotion of biofortified food crops that are rich in vitamins and minerals.

The partnership aims to build sustainable food systems that bridges the gap between agriculture and nutrition by designing and implementing practical and innovative agricultural extension and advisory service for scaling up the delivery of the biofortified crops in Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria and Uganda.

The MoU was signed by the President of SAA and the Chief Executive Officer of HarvestPlus. The collaboration will broaden the promotion of High Vitamin A Maize, High Vitamin A Cassava, High Iron Beans, High Zinc Rice, High Iron Pear Millet, and High Vitamin A Sweet Potato to help increase farmers income, food and nutrition security through promoting market-oriented, sustainable, resilient, and regenerative and nutrition sensitive agricultural innovations as well as building the capacity of Extension Agents and farmers. Additionally, the collaboration will develop sustainable value chains for biofortified crops to increase their availability, accessibility, affordability, and consumption; as well as analyse nutrition related issues, co-design feasible actions, facilitate and advocate for policy reforms and government led programs that can scale nutrition sensitive and climate smart technologies to improve nutrition outcome for the target populations.

The ultimate goals are to work together to increase agricultural productivity and competitiveness in order to ensure food and nutrition security, gender equity, increase in employment, increased incomes, livelihoods and reduced poverty across the agricultural value chain in the four target countries.

The Collaboration with HarvestPlus will help operationalize strategic objectives through jointly agreed initiatives for promoting transformation of African agriculture for economic growth and development through enhancing nutrition sensitive, sustainable intensification and market-oriented approaches in the agricultural extension and advisory services for resource poor communities.