image: A new Gates Foundation grant for $1.5 million to the University of Illinois' Soybean Innovation Laboratory will strengthen and expand testing of new seed products across sub-Saharan Africa.
Credit: Soybean Innovation Lab
URBANA, Ill. -- Developing a thriving soybean market in Africa doesn’t just represent a new crop in the rotation for smallholder farmers — it builds an entire ecosystem of seed companies, processors, and trade partners ready to enter the global soybean market. The Soybean Innovation Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been working toward this reality for more than a decade.
“With 12 years of federal funding from USAID, we conducted the research, built the infrastructure with our partners, and de-risked market-led growth in Africa’s soybean sector,” said Peter Goldsmith, SIL director and emeritus professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.
With USAID shuttered, SIL has gone from working in 31 countries to four: one of which is Malawi, where they’re leveraging the Shire Valley Transformation Program’s irrigation infrastructure to build up soybean in the region. This work was made possible by an anonymous $1 million donation. Now, SIL has secured another $1.5 million from the Gates Foundation to strengthen and expand testing of new seed products across sub-Saharan Africa.
Breaking the bottleneck in Africa’s seed systems
The new two-year investment will fund the expansion of SIL’s Pan-African Trials (PAT™) platform — a first-of-its-kind, market-based system that allows new soybean varieties to be tested, registered, and commercialized across multiple countries simultaneously.
For decades, African countries struggled to move new crop varieties from research to market due to fragmented, slow, and expensive national registration processes. As a result, farmers in countries like Malawi lacked access to new and improved soybean varieties, sometimes for a decade or more.
“Historically, the seed approval process in many countries takes at least two years, which can slow down the availability of new soybean varieties in the market,” Goldsmith explained. “Through PAT™, we’ve found a way to work within Africa’s regional trade structures so that once a soybean variety is registered in two countries, it becomes available in up to 28 others. That’s a massive breakthrough for farmers and seed companies.”
By 2027, SIL and its partners aim to register at least 10 new soybean varieties in the SADC and COMESA regional catalogs, including varieties with soybean rust resistance. Goldsmith is confident the plan will be successful because SIL and its partners have supported the release of eight new soybean varieties in Malawi alone since launching the PAT™ platform in 2019.
How investments in Africa benefit the world
While SIL’s work focuses on African farmers and seed systems, Goldsmith says the ripple effects reach far beyond the continent. Strengthening Africa’s soybean market helps stabilize the global supply chain, creates new trade opportunities, and opens pathways for collaboration across hemispheres.
Soybean demand is growing rapidly across sub-Saharan Africa, fueled by the rise of poultry, aquaculture, and plant-based protein industries. Goldsmith says opportunities abound for U.S. exports as soybean and soy products become the industrial standard across Africa.
“Every time a country builds a functional, transparent seed and grain market, the global system becomes more efficient and resilient,” Goldsmith added. “It creates a foundation for trade — from grain and seed to inputs, machinery, and management know-how — and those are areas where the U.S. continues to lead.”
Building on a foundation of public support
Goldsmith emphasizes that this milestone is built squarely on the foundation laid by years of public investment.
“This project wouldn’t exist without USAID’s early and sustained support,” he said. “Those funds enabled us to do the research, build partnerships, and understand the system well enough to make it work commercially. The market is taking over, which is good. However, what about the next innovation, breakthrough, or improvement? The Soybean Innovation Lab’s impact demonstrates the critical and powerful role public funding plays in the high-risk and slowly developing world of early-stage research and development.”
Research in the College of ACES is made possible in part by Hatch funding from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.