Arkansas connections in Rwanda change agricultural landscape

Rosine Ndayishimiye dreamed of becoming an astronaut in her youth. There was only one problem. She was a Rwanda native, and the African nation didn’t have a space program. To attain that goal, she would have to be educated in the United States.

As she got older, her career goals changed, but a seed had been planted. She wanted to cross the Atlantic for her education. Eventually, she was accepted into the Bridge2Rwanda Scholars program. It led her to earn a degree from Babson College in Massachusetts, and she is the director of training for B2R Farms, the nonprofit’s agricultural division.

Ndayishimiye said she thought her career path would have been in finance and remaining in the United States, not training farmers better methods for planting their own seeds in her native country.

“I wanted to be an astronaut,” she said with a smile. “I wanted to go up into the stars. We are now working on solving the issue of food insecurity.”

Businessman Dale Dawson started B2R in Little Rock in 2007 after meeting Bishop John Rucyahana, an entrepreneurial Anglican bishop from Rwanda. The two discussed the problems facing the country such as a lack of education, and Dawson decided he wanted to help. Years later, the agricultural division was formed, and Ndayishimiye became involved even though she had no farming experience at all. Rwanda has 2.4 million farmers and at least 3,500 rural villages.

“I had no background in agriculture,” she said. “I had no land to grow crops. I had no thought about being a farmer.”

That changed when she graduated from college, and she felt an urge to return to Rwanda. Farming suddenly entered into her psyche, and around that same time Dawson called her and said a 15-acre farm in the country had been donated to B2R.

She decided she would take a chance, and together with B2R they would create better, more sustainable farming practices in a place that desperately needed it, she said. B2R has partnered with the Clinton School Impact Center at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food, and Life Sciences to develop parts of the program.

About 70% of the population on the African continent relies on small-scale farming to survive. However, many traditional farming methods degrade the soil, drive down yields, and make the fields more susceptible to crop failures during droughts and soil erosion. When soil erodes, many nutrients are lost, which also impacts yields. In Rwanda, the soil erosion problem is even worse because much of the farmland is on steep slopes. Tilling is a conventional farming technique, and it exacerbates the soil issues, Ndayishimiye said.

Through the B2R program, Ndayishimiye and her team teach farmers about minimum or no tillage practices. Farmers are taught about crop rotations, using cover crops and even covering fields with mulch. Farmers are taught to focus on staple crops such as beans, potatoes and maize.

The goal is to minimize input costs and to maximize yields, she said. Since the program started in 2018, the results have been dramatic, she added.

Yields for farmers using these techniques have doubled and tripled on some farms, she said. Input costs are 20% less, labor percentage is 45% less, and on 93% of these farms little or no soil erosion was reported.

Besides growing more food to feed their families, farmers can grow enough to sell on open markets and can even dedicate part of their land to other crops that can also be sold. This not only solves a food insecurity problem but also creates economic opportunities, she said.

To date, 106,000 farmers have been trained through the program. One of the goals of the program is to get a test plot in every single village in the country so farmers can learn and see the results with their own eyes. Part of the program is dedicated to reaching as many farmers as possible. B2R Farms has a 12-month paid training program for 120 recent university graduates. It focuses on students with agricultural degrees.

Fellows in the program receive three months of intensive training and then are deployed throughout the country to train farmers and collect data. At least 2,491 sector agents have also been trained to do demonstrations on test plots in villages.

The goal of the program isn’t to just change farming practices in Rwanda. It’s to change farming practices throughout the continent, she said. Farmers and agents have been trained in 10 other countries so far, and the goal is to develop the program in all those countries.

During the second phase, the students will focus on surveying and data collection techniques. In phase three, students will return to Rwanda to analyze the collected data and compile a finalized report of their findings.

Rwanda doesn’t have any industrial farming, but Ndayishimiye hopes that will change in the coming decades. If she could say anything to the farmers she hasn’t reached yet, what would that be?

“They can become the best farmers in the world,” she said. “Sometimes less is more.”