Mama Manneh

Mama Manneh is creating replicable, grassroots-based solutions for the most severe food security problem facing farmers in the Sahel, the saison de soudure (season of hunger), beginning in June and lasting until October, when the last of a farmer’s remaining food stocks are exhausted, and before the early fall planting yields food.

Manneh saw an opportunity in the testing protocols of very promising “early yield” seed varieties (i.e. seeds that had been successfully used on other continents). These protocols routinely mandated a testing period on research farms, under ideal conditions, of four years. Leveraging his recognized expertise and reputation as a thoughtful, careful field researcher, Manneh convinced the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI), to sell him several promising F1 (early yielding) seed varieties of corn, groundnut, and millet.
Manneh then organized a “real farming world test” of these seeds—effectively running a parallel real world test, using women farmers. He taught the women to organize themselves into sections, with certain areas set aside for cultivation, and others for harvesting seed. Manneh taught them how to segregate the planting of the various seeds, one from the other, and from local species. Apart from a small control plot that Manneh maintained, the women’s groups took ownership and decided how the produce and the seed stock were to be managed.

This decision to invest the seed fully with the farmers put the farmers in a position to build up their seed stocks when the first harvest was successful, and it also provided an opportunity to be sellers of the high-quality seeds when news of their success attracted the attention of other farmer groups.

In Gambia and the Sahel, 75 percent of the farmers are at a subsistence level. For more than a century, farming in this area has extensively relied on monocropping of groundnut. Forest resources have been heavily exploited, resulting in poor soil conditions. To take just one example, as forest cover has retreated, women have had to shift to gathering cow dung for fuel.

The “hungry season” creates a culture of dependence on middlemen who make hungry season loans to farmers in exchange for locking up a farmer’s next harvest at favorable prices. The existing system also favors releasing new seed to larger farmers, who are prepared to pay for these new varieties and understand how to cultivate and when to harvest them.

Women, who do much, if not most of the farm work, have traditionally been excluded from discussions about farm management, including which seeds to plant and when. The “seed power” relationships have been bound up in male-to-male relationships between the farmer and moneylender, who is often also the farmer’s seed supplier.

Manneh began by selecting ten villages that were greatly in need of hungry season assistance. Their first decision was to choose the “seed bankers,” whose job it would be to conserve and multiply the seed, referring mostly to the early maturing groundnut, millet, and New Rice for Africa. Manneh preferred women as seed bankers, judging them to be more trustworthy and community focused. He also selected women to police the segregation of these plantings one from the other, and from other food under cultivation. Manneh worked with the women farmers to create the growing protocols, and to create a way for them to record valid results in spite of a lack of literacy.

When the first year harvest was successful, Manneh was approached by farmers from other villages to see if they could buy some of the harvested seed from him. He referred them back to the leaders of the project because it was not his decision. The villages opted to keep the harvested seed to build an adequate reserve. But more importantly, from Manneh’s perspective, is that the villages maintained the rigorous on-site testing of their plants to ensure that the quality of their seed (and the seeds early yielding makeup) was not diluted.

Armed with this result, of both the quality and perseverance of his pilot villages, Manneh has done several things. First, he approached research centers about creating a wider and well organized channel for doing parallel “real world” tests. Second, to enable the villages to process the millet husks and stalks, Manneh engaged in a collaborative stove design competition involving five COs working with small farmers in Senegal and Gambia. The villages reward for participating in the competition is early growing seeds to take back to their communities and develop in a way that maintains the integrity of the early growing seed varieties.

Manneh’s next step is to identify high potential early growing seed varieties that have evolved in ecological niches “in the wild.” He has begun to gather seeds from diverse early growing fonio (a staple crop) that he discovered through a network of “barefoot researchers” he mobilized to help him identify and collect useful varieties.

Manneh grew up on a farm in Gambia, and as a young person, he enlarged what had been a modest family garden into a neighborhood mini farm. Manneh’s family was poor, and the increased cultivation both fed them and provided a source of income from the sale of produce. He studied agriculture and became an extension worker with the Ministry of Agriculture.

After several frustrating years of trying to get the Ministry to channel more resources to small farmers (versus larger and foreign-owned commercial companies) Manneh decided to work directly with small farmers. For several years he experimented with various versions of a “farmer seed center.” In 2004 he began to collaborate with Ashoka Fellow Badara Jobe, who was expanding his concept of “farmer-centric” local research plots in Gambia. In 2007, armed with the experience he had gained from working intensively on a range of issues at the community level, Manneh convinced the AGRI affiliate in Senegal to sell him F1 seed still in the testing and review stages in Francophone Africa.

Over the past ten years, Manneh has had to resist family and religious pressure to become a seed seller instead of his preferred role as a facilitator of women’s groups; to use seed as part of a broader intervention to improve women’s status in their communities and address the fundamental issue of hunger.

Manneh is demonstrating that women can be knowledge entrepreneurs and dedicated farmer-researchers, as they explore how certain naturally evolved varieties of food staple crops may be able to provide complementary hungry season planting solutions, if their core characteristics can be studied, conserved, and managed carefully.