Senegal’s Presidential Award in 2003

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.

WARDA received the ‘Grand Prix du Président de la République pour les Sciences’ — Senegal’s highest award for Science — for the adaptation and dissemination of the ASI threshercleaner, the most widely used rice thresher in the country. President Abdoulaye Wade personally conferred this award on the WARDA team based in Senegal and its partners on 30 June 2003.

Partnership: key to the ASI success

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.