Seed Security Solution Package

Farmers need access to sufficient amounts of quality seed varieties to ensure income for their households and food for their communities. However, in fragile and conflict affected contexts, the compounding impacts of climate change, conflict, and poverty have resulted in a severe lack of high-quality and climate-adapted seeds in the market, and farmers face issues in accessing the limited supply that does exist. This means that farms are less productive than is necessary to provide adequate income and food. When farmers plant low quality seeds one season, they produce even lower quality seeds for the next; the situation is getting worse every year.

IRC is working in partnership with farmers in Niger, northeast Syria, Pakistan, and South Sudan to design, test, and scale solutions to strengthen availability, access, and quality of seeds in each system. In northeast Syria and Pakistan, where our work is later stage, we have generated a solution package to disrupt the vicious cycle and support farmers to be stewards of their own economic futures while restoring and maintaining the health of their land. Through a networked approach, we are empowering farmers to be citizen scientists so that they can build a more resilient system themselves by:

• Testing existing seed varieties to identify those best adapted to the local climatic conditions
• Multiplying the identified higher yielding and more climate-resilient seed varieties and donating a portion of the yield to other farmers to expand the network
• Repeating each season with a growing network of farmers, progressively enhancing the availability of quality seeds and ensuring vulnerable communities can continue farming even when institutions fail

Our support for this growing farmer network includes a full agricultural input package for each participating farmer, ongoing training and support, and the organization and incentivization of participation through networks, contests, and rewards. Through all technical support components, we promote the use of climate resilient agricultural practices which enhance both the sustainable use and productivity of farm land.

This networked approach fills a gap where current bread and butter seed solutions are insufficient. Current NGO approaches, such as cash for seeds interventions (which provide farmers cash to purchase the inputs they need most in the local market) or trainings in agricultural practices are not enough when the seeds available in the local market are of low quality or are scarce. Further, these approaches do not address the underlying system breakdowns, cannot meet the need, and often promote dependency.

The solution package takes a people-first approach; it is rooted in farmers and their communities to promote its acceptability and enhance its resilience to potential political shocks and contextual changes. At the heart of the solution package is an understanding that farmers know their contexts best and, equipped with knowledge and resources, are best positioned to build a more resilient system.

We are currently conducting design research in Niger and South Sudan and are investigating if a similar model should be adapted for these contexts, or if other leverage points in the systems show more promise.

Northeast Syria Pilot

In northeast Syria, the effects of chronic drought, a sharp decline in water flow, the destruction of vital agricultural infrastructure, rampant inflation, and a 13-year war has led to escalating prices and a reduction in seed quality and availability. 122,000 farmers across northeast Syria are now in need of food and agricultural assistance and 1.62 million people in their surrounding communities are experiencing food insecurity. Women are especially vulnerable given their expanding role as bread-winners and heads of household and their more limited access to agro-inputs and information compared to men.

IRC employee inspecting a wheat demo plot in northeast Syria.

Testing In-Progress

In the first year of the pilot (2022-2023 agricultural season) we worked with a cohort of 30 seed testers (20% women) and 100 seed multipliers (18% women) across two locations (Trbaspiyeh and Raqqa) with a focus on the wheat value chain. The scale of women’s participation is notable, as wheat is a cash crop in Syria and traditionally only cultivated by men. Most women participants in the project had never cultivated wheat before. Embedded in the pilot were a series of behavioral experiments to ensure participant uptake and follow through and to identify behavioral solutions to enhance women’s participation in wheat seed multiplication. Key successes from the first year of the pilot include:

• Seed testers identified a more drought resistant and higher yielding wheat seed variety which is currently being scaled up through multiplication in year 2.
• On average, the percent of participating farmers using climate smart practices increased from 18.6% at baseline to 63.9% at endline (a positive change of 45.3% in just one season).
• Women represented 18% of overall project participants (18/100) and 40% of champion farmers (4/10). Though adoption of climate-smart practices was high across participants, it was 14% higher among women and women participants repeatedly identified the project as a great source of pride.
• We observed high client satisfaction with the solution with 92% of eligible farmers returning for year 2.

We are currently in the second year of a pilot and have expanded in scale in terms of participants, locations, and seed varieties we are testing. In the 2023-2024 agricultural season we are working with a cohort of 60 farmers in seed testing (27% women) and 200 farmers in seed multiplication (23% women) across three locations (Amuda, Raqqa, and Trbaspiyeh) and are testing ten wheat seed varieties (compared to two in the first year). We are also estimating cost efficiency, refining scale and impact projections, and collecting user feedback as we prepare for an impact evaluation in 2026.

Pakistan Prototype

In Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh provinces, political instability, governance gaps, and recurring climate-induced disasters have hindered effective agricultural policies and their implementation, rendering farming communities especially vulnerable. In 2022, devastating floods affected around 33 million people (15% of the total population) washing out crops, livestock assets, forests and agricultural infrastructure, compounding pre-existing shortages of arable land and water and aggravating an already alarming situation for agricultural communities. There are 1.43 million farmers in our target regions are in need of food and agricultural assistance, and 12 million people in their surrounding communities are experiencing food insecurity.

Design In-Progress

We are in the process of adapting this solution package to the Pakistani context and thus far have determined three key adjustments:

1. We will target farmers in five districts across two provinces (Swat, Burner and Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; Umerkot and Tando Allahyar in Sindh).
2. We will support testing and multiplication of three crops across both seasons of the agricultural calendar; wheat (winter) and maize (summer) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and wheat (winter) and mung beans (summer) in Sindh.
3. At the end of the season, multipliers will have the option to either donate their seeds to other farmers or exchange them for a different crop.

So far we have conducted focus group discussions with 193 farmers (including 102 women) as well as 11 stakeholders in the system (academics and representatives from the government extension department, local nonprofits, global NGOs, and the private sector). We are leveraging learnings from these discussions to further refine the solution package for Pakistan to arrive at functional models ready to implement in a pilot.

Looking Ahead

We are expanding this portfolio to other countries, including Niger and South Sudan: learnings from these more advanced projects in Pakistan and Syria will be leveraged alongside design research insights in each country as we embark on these new scopes of work. Our long term aim is to generate a bank of seed security solutions which can be contextually adapted and scaled across countries that are facing similar constraints, barriers, and challenges.

We also hope to leverage early successes as proof of the viability of investing in climate resilience in fragile contexts and to therefore advocate across the sector for greater investment in people-first climate resilience solutions where the need is most urgent. Catalytic investments in our innovation process will help the IRC to reach agro-pastoral communities and people that rely on them, supporting them to make critical adjustments at an inflection point when the impact of climate change is straining their resources and limiting their futures. Funding this work will enable us to generate breakthrough solutions for the millions of people who are in need of food and agricultural assistance in fragile contexts globally.