In response to the 1980’s drought in Africa, Roichi Sasakawa, the then Chairman of the Nippon Foundation (NF) reached out to Nobel Laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug and to former U.S.
President Jimmy Carter in search of a more sustainable solution to Africa’s food challenges. Sasakawa’s vision is for a Green Revolution in Africa, similar to that in Asian Subcontinent that was sparked by Dr. Borlaug’s research done on higher yielding wheat varieties; NF was prepared to fund the long-term effort needed to achieve it. The SAA was thus established in 1986 and it has been working for over 30 years in agricultural extension and smallholder agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa and has been active in 15
African countries, where it played the lead in grassroots efforts of modernizing the technologies smallholder farmers use to produce food, helped them organize to get credit, acquire inputs, and market their surplus produce more successfully, to improve the lives of millions of rural people.