One of the driving forces behind SSG is that, for virtually every country experiencing food shortages and hunger, worldwide, proven agricultural technologies – most critically, the seed – already exist to allow farmers to double and triple their crop yields, making food more abundant and affordable, and growing rural economies.  The main challenge is making the seed and related technologies available locally, allowing farmers to adopt their use and begin achieving higher yields.  

A critical, unavoidable element of this is creating farmer awareness and demand at-scale, so that private, local entrepreneurs can supply them profitably.  This is why the VBA/Small Pack Model is a breakthrough in establishing farmer access to improved seed and other technologies.  It employs Village-Based Advisors (VBAs) to distribute small (25 g -100 g) packages of seed of improved crop varieties to every farmer in each village.  It rapidly raises farmer awareness and demand at scale.  

The model was originally developed by FIPS-Africa (https://fipsafrica.org/) in Kenya in the mid-1990s to enable large numbers of farmers to grow new crop varieties on their own farms together with good agronomic practices.  It was then tested in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Nigeria where it worked equally well. Subsequently, it was adopted by Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA’s) (https://agra.org/) implementing partners in Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Ghana, who over the period 2018-2022 disseminated small packs of new seed to more than 6 million farmers.

In 2020, FIPS-Africa established an International Training Unit (ITU) to train extension partners in left-behind on how to implement the VBA/Small Pack Model. In 2021, SSG and FIPS-Africa signed an agreement for the ITU to begin training SSG’s implementing partners in 13 countries on how to apply the VBA/Small Pack Model to rapidly create demand for seed produced by emerging seed companies also supported by SSG.

Initially, SSG contracted FIPS-Africa to train its partners in Eritrea, Djibouti, South Sudan, and Somalia to implement the VBA/Small Pack Model under the IFAD-funded “Build Back Better” project. Since then, FIPS-Africa has expanded its training to partners in SSG projects across DR Congo, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Madagascar, Ghana, and Kenya.

In just four years, FIPS-Africa has trained 60 organizations in 14 of SSG’s project countries to select 5,840 VBAs, who have distributed 1,915,224 small seed packs to 865,923 farmers (see table below).

Summary of small pack distributionand organizations trained

Country	Farmers Reached	Small Packs Distributed	VBAs per Country	Organizations Trained
Burundi	404,080	632,400	216	8
Cote D’Ivoire	1,002	13,000	247	3
Djibouti	982	6,000	42	1
DR Congo	113,000	382,152	100	8
Eritrea	33,611	73,574	1,121	1
Kenya	20,895	88,788	144	2
Ghana	701	1,205	27	3
Madagascar	15,212	19,791	268	5
Malawi	19,037	20,800	200	4
Senegal	14,017	17,000	50	6
Sierra Leone	13,896	40,000	200	4
Somalia	137,490	380,784	2,443	4
South Sudan	52,045	174,230	506	5
Togo	39,955	65,500	276	6
Total	865,923	1,915,224	5,840	60

The VBA/Small Pack Model has proven to be a transformative intervention for smallholder farmers. It has also infused governments with a vision for how they can meaningfully improve farmers’ lives rapidly, on a national scale. Sierra Leone rice farmers, for example, have shared inspiring testimonies of how small seed packs have transformed their yields, with some reporting harvests of up to 43 kilograms of rice grain from just two 100-gram packs of seed of new varieties.

By empowering smallholder farmers with quality seeds, knowledge, and support, the VBA/Small Pack Model has not only boosted productivity but has also set the stage for long-term food security and economic growth. The success of the VBA/Small Pack Model is a testament to the power of innovation, collaboration, and private sector-driven development.