The Bill and Melinda Gates Foun­da­tion is announc­ing expand­ing their efforts to help agri­cul­ture in Africa. The Gates Foun­da­tion has done a lot of work in sup­ply­ing seed and fer­til­izer but they are now mov­ing into edu­ca­tion for farm­ers and polit­i­cal advo­cacy for agri­cul­ture.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press story that we found at KSL, writer Donna Gor­don Blank­in­ship tells us of what this new round of grant money will be used for.

The foun­da­tion announced nine grants total­ing nearly $120 mil­lion a few hours before Bill Gates was sched­uled to give his first major speech on agri­cul­ture as the keynote speaker at the World Food Prize event in Des Moines, Iowa.

In the past three years, the Gates Foun­da­tion has com­mit­ted $1.4 bil­lion to help small farm­ers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia increase their yields and incomes. The foun­da­tion got involved in agri­cul­ture after years of try­ing to solve world­wide health problems.

About half of the grants announced Thurs­day will go toward agri­cul­ture research in Africa, includ­ing exper­i­ments with sorghum, mil­let, legumes and sweet pota­toes. But sev­eral unusual projects were included, includ­ing pro­pos­als to use cell phones and radio pro­grams to edu­cate small farmers.

The foun­da­tion gave the Alliance for a Green Rev­o­lu­tion in Africa $15 mil­lion to influ­ence agri­cul­tural pol­icy in more than a dozen African nations. The alliance won’t be lob­by­ing for pol­icy changes, but they will be doing research on what kinds of pol­icy changes would best stim­u­late agri­cul­tural growth in the region and will be train­ing Africans to advo­cate for themselves.

AGRA plans to train about 400 agri­cul­ture econ­o­mists at sev­eral African uni­ver­si­ties so they can ana­lyze poli­cies and advo­cate for change, said Namanga Ngongi, pres­i­dent of the alliance, in a tele­phone inter­view from Des Moines on Tuesday.

“Tech­ni­cal solu­tions can only go so far because there are many block­ages to devel­op­ment,” said Ngongi, who is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

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