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News and Notes
Milestones
The ‘Award Winner’ ASI development team with the President of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade (3rd from left), on the occasion of the Science Award
Ceremony, Dakar, Senegal, 30 June 2003.
Dr G Guei, Head, Genetic Resources Unit, represented CGIAR at the Africa Economic Summit, Durban, South Africa, 11–13 June
2003
Workshops
Participants of the training course on Impact Assessment Methodology, Conakry, Guinea, 5–16 May 2003 organized by the ROCARIZ Rice Network. Twelve participants from Guinea, The Gambia, Gabon, Benin, and DR Congo attended.
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Two training courses on Participatory Learning and Action Research (PLAR) for integrated rice management in inland valleys were conducted, 16–20 June 2003 in Sikasso, Mali and 23–27 June 2003, in Kumasi, Ghana. Twenty-five participants from Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mali and Senegal
attended the first one, and 20 participants from The Gambia, Ghana and Nigeria attended the second.
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Partnership:
key to the ASI success
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In the irrigated rice systems of West Africa, threshing and cleaning are manually carried out mostly by women who spend hours on these back-breaking
operations. This not only affects their health, but also the grain quality and profitability of rice.
The ADRAO/SAED/ ISRA (ASI)
thresher-cleaner was developed to address these problems. Based on a prototype from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), ASI has gone through several adaptations to match perfectly the Senegal River Valley
conditions.
The partners in this successful venture are the Institut sénégalais de recherches agricoles (ISRA), the Société d’aménagement et d’exploitation des terres du delta du fleuve Sénégal (SAED), WARDA-Senegal, local manufacturers and farmers.
ASI has a threshing capacity of 6 tonnes of paddy rice per day (compared with 2 tonnes for Votex—the other widely used thresher) and grain-straw separation rate of 99%. It is not surprising, therefore, that over 100 ASIs have been constructed in Senegal since its official release and over 40% of the total paddy harvested in the Senegal River Valley is now threshed with ASI, making it the most widely used thresher in the area.
ASI’s popularity has grown so rapidly that it has now spread to other countries in the region, and WARDA has been collaborating with partners in Mali, Mauritania, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire to develop appropriate prototypes.
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