PRISE Expansion Mission

About the project

UK-registered Partner: Assimila Ltd – Andy Shaw
Africa-registered Partner: Mercy Corps – Ferhana Jelaludin

PRISE – the Pest Risk Information Service – provides advisory information to smallholder farmers in order to prevent and control pest and disease occurrence. Currently operating in four countries (Kenya, Ghana, Zambia and Malawi), PRISE is ready to expand into new territory.

The travel grant enabled two PRISE staff (Andy Shaw, Assimila and Henry Mibei, CABI) to meet with new potential partners in Eastern Africa, enabled and supported by the Mercy Corps AgriFin programme. The AgriFin programme supports smallholder farmers across the globe by providing support to design, test and scale digital solutions. PRISE and AgriFin are working together to identify how new digital Advisory tools can be deployed to enable better decisions on crop pest and disease management.

The travel grant supported meetings between Assimila, CABI and AgriFin partners including Sprout (Kenya, Ethiopia), Lersha (Ethiopia), Ethiopian Agriculture Transformation Institute (Ethiopia), Acre Africa (various), Regen Organics (Kenya) and TomorrowNow (Kenya). PRISE partners are now in discussion with each organisation to identify how PRISE Advisory messaging can be disseminated to each network of farmers and advisers. Discussions are also taking place regarding new crop/pest models required by each partner and how to diversify PRISE to address wider production risk issues.