We view human and institutional capacity strengthening as the key to building ownership of the project by national institutions and consequently ensuring sustainability of not only AfSIS, but also the science and technology behind it. Whereas the capacity building component will relate directly to activities of the project, impacts on policy in government and private institutions on soils monitoring, research, and extension are expected to provide a model for AGRA and its grantees to scale-out to other countries beyond the initial ones directly supported by AfSIS (Tanzania, Mali, Malawi, Nigeria and Kenya).

The project’s capacity building priorities are based on needs identified through consultation with national programs in Africa over a number of years, for example through a NEPAD Roundtable (Swift and Shepherd, 2007) and TSBF’s Africa network (AfNet). Major constraints to previous efforts included: (i) lack of soil scientists trained in new soil science and technology, and (ii) laboratory infrastructural constraints, including reliable electricity supply, water, broadband internet connectivity, and equipment maintenance services. In addition to other support to the NARS, this brings an upgraded level of investing in NARS empowerment, and a possible model for scaling out. The project's main capacity strengthening activities include: (1) coordination with national partners; (2) improving physical infrastructure; (3) on the job training of NARS scientific and technical staff on infrared spectroscopy techniques, soil surveillance techniques, conducting ISFM trials and making spatially explicit soil management recommendations; (4) graduate student research; and (5) analyzing AfSIS recommendations for policy reformulation and formalization.

Coordination with partner countries includes the following:

•    Communication with partners and activities within individual countries. The TSBF NARS coordinator liaises with the specific country coordinator to ensure that the country scientific teams are in place and well briefed, and that the end users are effectively engaged and aware of their participation and roles in the project.

•    Joint activities with AGRA and their grantees to ensure that ASIS meets AGRA’s expectations in terms of generated soils and related information

•    International coordination, including joint actions between several countries such as international workshops, etc.

•    Training at PhD and MSc level, both in terms of first carrying out a needs assessment and then tailoring the needs with recruitment and gender considerations. Training at MSc and PhD levels will ensure female scientists get equal opportunities to their male counterparts. Recruitment of new project employees will also be coordinated by TSBF to ensure all vacancies are filled in according to CIAT-TSBF regulations and that gender is taken into account during the recruitment. The Principal Investigator will coordinate most of the activities jointly with the ASIS Executive Officer.

•    Delivery of outputs by the different objective leaders to ensure that activities of some objectives do not suffer due to late delivery of output or misalignment of outputs that feed into the activities of the other objectives. For example, outputs of objective three are required to implement activities of objectives 2, 4 and 5.

•    Laboratory infrastructure and capacity strengthening in Tanzania, Mali, and Malawi.  We will provide support to three national soil labs, located at ARI near Arusha in Tanzania, the Institut d’Economie Rural (IER) in Bamako, Mali, and the Department of Agricultural Research and Services near Lilongwe in Malawi. These laboratories will serve as regional hubs to provide exposure training to other countries in each region (which in turn will create demand for ASIS science and technology in these countries) and serve both project and AGRA needs for high throughput soil analysis. The laboratories will be backstopped by ICRAF’s soil and plant testing laboratory in terms of providing scientific and technical support, reference analyses and quality control. ICRAF, with the assistance of the regional soil scientists, is  training NARS partners in the five countries (including Nigeria and Kenya) on the use of the spectrometers during the project life-cycle. This includes intensive hands-on training in soil preparation and archiving, spectrometer installation, operation and maintenance, data management and interfacing with ASIS database systems, spectral calibration of soil, plant nutrition, and organic resource quality parameters, and data interpretation. ICRAF is also assisting the national NIR spectral laboratories to develop business enterprises so that they can serve national, AGRA and other user needs as independent units. TropAg’s Associate Director for Business Enterprise Development will provide advise to AfSIS at no cost.

•    On-the-job soil survey training in 21 countries in SSA. The project is conducting field sampling at 60 sentinel sites in 21 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The project team is jointly working with soil survey staff in each of the countries to provide on the job training. This is being undertaken to support a new generation of African soil scientists and natural resource management professionals needed to ensure that the generated information is actually used to improve land management and policy decision-making in SSA. TSBF, TropAg, ISRIC, ICRAF, and AGRA, are jointly responsible for attaining this objective. We believe this will help reverse the trend of declining capacity in conventional soil science approaches in SSA (Walter et al., 2006; Swift & Shepherd, 2007). It is expected that after this rigorous training, the NARS survey teams will be able to describe additional sentinel sites using their individual country resources or using funds provided by additional funding from other donors. Ultimately we foresee soil health surveillance systems as becoming an integral component of national strategies for agricultural research and development and environmental management.

Some of the techniques used for on-the-job training  include:
•    Joint field and laboratory assessment and monitoring of soil health and degradation,
•    Training on spatial data compilation, data management and web-based distribution,
•    Design and implementation of ISFM trials for testing soil management recommendations including participatory approaches for involving farmers (desegregated according to gender), NGOs and other local stakeholders,
•    Design and implementation of research activities in supplementary on-station field experiments on soil management.
•    Recommending logical and practical management interventions based on analysis and interpretation of data, and
•    Interpreting and translating soil management recommendations for local conditions, and linking them to the digital maps for use in dissemination to end-users.