Developing a thriving soybean market in Africa doesn’t just represent a new crop in the rotation for smallholder farmers it builds an entire ecosystem of seed companies, processors, and trade partners ready to enter the global soybean market. The Soybean Innovation Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been working toward this reality for more than a decade.
“With 12 years of federal funding from USAID, we conducted the research, built the infrastructure with our partners, and de-risked market-led growth in Africa’s soybean sector,” said Peter Goldsmith, SIL director and emeritus professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.
With USAID shuttered, SIL has gone from working in 31 countries to four: one of which is Malawi, where they’re leveraging the Shire Valley Transformation Program’s irrigation infrastructure to build up soybean in the region. This work was made possible by an anonymous $1 million donation. Now, SIL has secured another $1.5 million from the Gates Foundation to strengthen and expand testing of new seed products across sub-Saharan Africa.
Breaking the bottleneck in Africa’s seed systems
The new two-year investment will fund the expansion of SIL’s Pan-African Trials (PAT™) platform a first-of-its-kind, market-based system that allows new soybean varieties to be tested, registered, and commercialized across multiple countries simultaneously.
For decades, African countries struggled to move new crop varieties from research to market due to fragmented, slow, and expensive national registration processes. As a result, farmers in countries like Malawi lacked access to new and improved soybean varieties, sometimes for a decade or more.
“Historically, the seed approval process in many countries takes at least two years, which can slow down the availability of new soybean varieties in the market,” Goldsmith explained. “Through PAT™, we’ve found a way to work within Africa’s regional trade structures so that once a soybean variety is registered in two countries, it becomes available in up to 28 others. That’s a massive breakthrough for farmers and seed companies.”
By 2027, SIL and its partners aim to register at least 10 new soybean varieties in the SADC and COMESA regional catalogs, including varieties with soybean rust resistance. Goldsmith is confident the plan will be successful because SIL and its partners have supported the release of eight new soybean varieties in Malawi alone since launching the PAT™ platform in 2019.
How investments in Africa benefit the world
While SIL’s work focuses on African farmers and seed systems, Goldsmith says the ripple effects reach far beyond the continent. Strengthening Africa’s soybean market helps stabilize the global supply chain, creates new trade opportunities, and opens pathways for collaboration across hemispheres.
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