Concluding Remarks: The Tropical Legumes Projects Empowered Communities in a Wide Variety of Assets

Abstract

After 12 years of activity, the Tropical Legumes (TL) projects come to an end the year 2019. In addition to quantitative impact assessment, this publication brings to light various stakeholders’ own words about the kind of benefits they have made thanks to the TL projects. Research institutions, management and technical staff, extension services, NGOs, public and private seed companies, agro-dealers, farmer cooperatives, farmer groups, individual seed entrepreneurs, farmers, women farmers, processors, farm implement makers, middlemen, and traders have all shared their unique impact stories for being part of TL families. From poor knowledge of recently developed legume technologies, most communities in the project areas of the target countries have been widely exposed and have a very good knowledge and use of newly released varieties of groundnut, common bean, cowpea and chickpea. This allowed them to increase crop productivity and production, improve resilience to advert weather conditions, and enhance family welfare through various livelihood assets such as ownership of land, houses, transport means, market connections, social recognition, food security, children education, health care, etc. The huge smiles on different faces pictured in this publication is illustrative