Banana seed systems in rural low resource communities: Community training manual

Diseases have been threatening banana plantations across the world including Burundi; causing the lack of clean planting material. Stakeholders of banana sector have been producing plantlets from vitroculture or macropropagation and acclimating them in community nurseries before distribution. Where it is possible, communities’ members were trained on how to establish and manage macropropation units and nurseries.
This way of suppling planting material to communities does not allow all farmers to get wanted plantings in quality and quantity at the right moment. In addition, when they try to produce plantings themselves using these technologies, few of them are able due to the lack of mastering the technics or inputs needed. Finally, the only way supplying banana planting material to many farmers is the local plantations. Therefore, there is a need of improving the quality and the quantity of these local sources. In that framework, Bioversity International prepared a training manual to allow communities produce themselves enough banana planting material diseases free in a mother garden which will allow the farmers to locally multiply wanted banana varieties at a lowest cost with a simple technicity at the right time. This manual informs the users on the mother garden establishment and management, seed selection and quality assessment, methods of rapid propagation, on quality control supervision checks and pricing and on low hazard distribution and tracing of seed. It will be used by people wishing to produce, sell and distribute banana planting material within communities like farmers, extensions, banana projects workers, community leaders.