Smallholder farmers’ capacity building on community seed banking

Seed Savers Network-Kenya (SSN-Kenya) is a national grassroots farmers’ organization dedicated to promoting food and seed sovereignty. SSN-Kenya safeguards plant genetic materials through on-farm seed saving, community seed banks, and field genebanks for agrobiodiversity conservation. It has a network of over 50,000 farmers across five counties in Kenya, including Nakuru, Nyandarua, Kiambu, Baringo, and Kakamega in seed saving at farm level, ecological Agriculture, capacity building, community biodiversity register (CBR), open-source seed system (OSSS) and Advocacy for food sovereignty. In its12 years of existence, more than 60 000 small-scale farmers have been trained and empowered in crop diversification using locally available seeds and soil fertility amendments. SSN-Kenya has established 100 community seed banks in different villages of Kenya, where each seed bank covers at least 600 people in a village. Through their various capacity-building activities for the farmers, they saved more than 300 varieties of seeds that may have been lost. More importantly, they improved the food supply to more than 20 000 households and thus lower food insecurity cases while improving health through consumption of more nutritious diets from their farms.