The connective tissue of Africa’s seed systems.
A single trusted registry mapping seed companies, cooperatives, offtakers, and partners across sorghum, common bean, and groundnut value chains — so institutions can find the right actors, fast.
Live Registry
seed-system actors in the registry
Is your organisation part of the seed system?
Seed companies, cooperatives, offtakers, and other seed-system actors can add themselves to the registry. Every submission is reviewed by the PABRA team before it is published, so nothing you send goes live automatically.
Register your organisationActors mapped
Major crops
Regions covered
Actor types
Accelerating variety turnover for Tanzania’s farmers
ACCELERATE — Accelerated Variety Turnover for Open-Pollinated Crops in Tanzania — is a four-year initiative (2023–2026) led by the Alliance of Bioversity International & CIAT and the Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA), funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It builds a scalable, demand-led model that helps new, higher-yielding seed varieties reach the farmers who need them — faster.
Today only about 3% of farmers’ planting needs are met by the formal seed sector. Most farmers still plant old, low-yielding varieties that are vulnerable to climate stress. ACCELERATE closes that gap by connecting seed producers with the traders, processors, and institutions that actually drive demand. The registry is now run by PABRA, the Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance — a partnership across more than 30 African countries.
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A demand-led seed system
Instead of pushing seed at farmers, ACCELERATE starts with demand. By linking formal, semi-formal, and informal seed sectors to the traders and buyers who already move grain, quality seed gets pulled through the value chain.
Information flow
Better information to and from large traders, grain producers, and seed producers builds real demand for quality seed.
Marketplace traders
Engaging the traders who buy and sell grain every day turns the marketplace into an engine for adoption.
Institutional buyers
When institutional buyers know about — and can access — improved varieties, turnover speeds up and farmer incomes and nutrition rise.
Crop coverage
Registry actors mapped across three priority seed-system value chains.
Sorghum
A drought-tolerant staple crop central to food security across Africa, with a growing network of certified seed producers and agro-dealer distributors along formal value chains.
Common Bean
One of Africa’s most widely traded legumes, linking smallholder producers to regional cooperatives, offtakers, and institutional buyers across multiple market segments.
Groundnut
A high-value oil crop connecting seed companies, processors, and export-oriented agribusinesses within an expanding African seed-system value chain.
The coalition behind ACCELERATE
ACCELERATE, the project this registry began under, is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and led by the Alliance of Bioversity International & CIAT and PABRA, with the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI), the Tanzania Official Seed Certification Institute (TOSCI), and CIMMYT.
Find the right seed-system actors, faster.
Explore seed-system actors across sorghum, common bean, and groundnut value chains — or learn how the ACCELERATE model works.