Setting Priorities among Indigenous Fruit Tree Species in Africa: Examples from Southern, Eastern and Western Africa Regions - Indigenous Fruit Trees in the Tropics: Domestication, Utilization and Commercialization - page 23

workshops rated high-value oil and wine products lower than low-value juice
and jam products. Community processors are aware of the value of oil and
wine products but they do not have access to the skills and technology required
to process them. It also seems that people are more familiar with the
technologies required to process exotic fruit products than indigenous fruits.
The overall product rating for Malawi indicated that mango products were
the most preferred. Only one indigenous product, Uapaca juice, was rated
amongst the top five products from Malawi. In the Tabora workshop, Syzygium
juice was rated as the overall most preferred product along with two other
indigenous products, Strychnos juice and Vitex jam, amongst the top five
products. The Zimbabwe group rated the high-value oil products highest,
followed by Ziziphus fruit leather (puréed then dried) and marula jelly.
There were some differences between the 'spontaneous' preferences of
participants (Table 1.11) and the overall rankings from the assessment of
products on ecological, socio-economic, market and technical aspects (Tables
1.12-1.14). In the Tanzania workshop, baobab juice dropped from first place in
the spontaneous ranking to ninth in the more detailed assessment, performing
poorly on all four criteria. In contrast, guava jam rose from tenth to second,
performing particularly well on socio-economic and technical criteria. In the
Zimbabwe workshop, Ziziphus fruit leather rose from fifth to first and Strychnos
jelly fell from second to sixth. In Malawi, there was little difference between the
rankings in the two exercises.
1.4 Conclusions
Several important lessons were learned from the priority-setting exercises.
These can be divided into two areas: the role of priority setting in
domestication research and methods for setting priorities.
1.4.1 The role of priority setting
First, the hypothesis that there would be some degree of consensus among
farmers in the different countries of an ecoregion as to which species they
preferred proved to be valid. In the Sahel and southern Africa there was
considerable consensus. In the Sahel, one species appeared in the top five of
all four countries and two were in the top five of three countries. In southern
Africa, three species appeared in the top five of all five countries. There was
less convergence of views across countries in the humid lowlands of West
Africa. No species appeared in the top five of all three countries but four
appeared in the top five of two countries. A regional approach to conducting
dissemination research is valuable because it allows tasks to be divided among
countries and experiences to be shared, making the best use of scarce resources
for conducting research.
The prioritization procedure proved to be an effective tool for developing a
shortlist of target species for domestication research and for setting priorities