1. Project 106511​: Sustainable production and utilization of the indigenous vegetables of southwest Nigeria for economic empowerment(NICANVEG). Project Website: http://www.uniosun-nicanveg.org/Home_Page.html​

The project is undertaken under the Canadian International Food Security Research Fund (CIFSRF) with the financial support of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and the Government of Canada, provided through the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD). On underutilized indigenous vegetables, the research is using a participatory approach involving rural women, farmers and scientists to conduct the ecological impact assessments of crop diversification, economic and financial analyses, conventional propagation studies using stem cuttings and seeds as planting materials, product processing and preservation and value addition studies. A major focus of the research is training of poor rural women and farmers on production, processing, utilization and marketing of underutilized vegetables for food security and financial empowerment.

This project is a joint collaboration among four (4) partners, the Osun State University and Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria and the University of Manitoba and Cape Breton University in Canada. Both Nigerian Universities are strongly supported by participation of the FADAMA group. The research consists of expertise in food science, soil science, horticulture and plant science, economics, gender specialists, agriculture extension, and rural sociologists. The The Nigerian Universities are conducting the entire field work at sixteen (16) field sites in Nigeria. Project training and scientific mentoring for key participants is being provided in Canada.
The Canadians teams; University of Manitoba and Cape Breton University, are providing short-term training platform for Nigerian scientists and students working on this project. The Cape Breton University is providing training in ecology, economics, marketing, and gender analysis and advice on project implementation, monitoring and reporting. The University of Manitoba is involved in training in soils, agronomy and food science and advice on project implementation, monitoring and reporting. The expertise of the third party (Helping Hands Resource Centre for Immigrants, Canada) in packaging research information, translating, disseminating and demonstrating the project findings through cooking workshops, food preparation training on leaf vegetables at the rural level will also benefit this project.

2.Knowing each other: every-day religious encounters, social identities and tolerance in south-west Nigeria

Project Website: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/historycultures/departments/dasa/research/knowing/team.aspx

Funded by the European Research Council (ERC), the research project maps out possibilities for the study of everyday religious encounter among the multi-religious Yoruba people of southwest Nigeria. In addition to more traditional historical and anthropological methods, it draws on an ethnographic door-to-door survey of over 2,500 respondents from different Nigerian states and from rural as well as urban communities which offers information on a wide range of topics. The project will focus especially on the topics of gender and marriage, youth and education, life and family histories, death and funerals as well as moral frameworks and meaning.

By exploring the ways in which different social identities are linked to dispositions and sensibilities that enable the avoidance or resolution of inter-religious conflicts, our research will develop comparative insights into different forms of tolerance in Yoruba society. We hope to explore whether there are tolerant dispositions or forms of habitus that will enable us to develop a comparative framework that can include forms of tolerance in other societies.

Also, while Yoruba religious debates are not free from relations of power, they are also earnestly engaged in the construction of meaning. The proposed research will explore religious discourse as a locus of lived engagement with moral frameworks, and of individual struggles for the creation and contestation of meaning, and it will seek to understand the specific as well as the general conditions under which meaningful discourse occurs.

3. Project 107983: Micro-dosing indigenous vegetables to combat poverty (Micro-Veg)

This project is funded by the Canadian Government IDRC-DFATD for 2015-2019. Chronic food insecurity is undermining development in Subsaharan West Africa. The general objective of the project is to increase food, nutritional, and economic security of smallholder farming communities in Nigeria and Benin. Specifically, we will accomplish this via accelerating the large-scale adoption of underutilized indigenous vegetables and improved soil fertility management practices. The specific objectives are to: (1) Develop technology capsule on fertilizer micro-dosing and water management technologies, value addition technology and seed production for indigenous vegetables. (2)Test, demonstrate and deploy two different models (Innovations Platform and Satellite Dissemination Approach) for reaching and benefiting more farmers with sustainable vegetable production and marketing innovations. (3) Scale up the technology capsule to advance indigenous vegetables production, increase yields, preserve soil and water ecosystems and enable fertilizer cost-saving. (4) Promote policy advocacy to integrate the successful scaling up model into local, national and regional food security programmes in the West African sub-region. Over a 36-month period, this project will support the generation of knowledge and innovations for large-scale positive economic changes in southwestern Nigeria and Benin.