Widespread death and displacement might cause farmers to lose or abandon their traditional wealth of seeds, resulting in a loss of precious biodiversity.

SOH acted on its knowledge to multiply well-adapted seed in neighboring Tanzania and Uganda so that aid agencies would not have to look further afield or bring in non-adapted varieties. This produced 1.5 tons of bean seed of more than 275 different types; 7 tons of sorghum seed adapted to the three major Rwandan agroecologies (low, medium and high elevation); 152 tons of three main adapted varieties of maize; and 20 tons of seed potatoes. Within these efforts, the case of potato was particularly telling. Much of the potato germplasm funneled into Rwanda by the PRAPACE network, derived from seed that Uganda had itself received from the PRAPACE network in 1988 when it was recovering from the nightmare caused by the Idi Amin regime. What goes around, sometimes really does come around.

One impediment in providing relief materials to Rwanda was the difficulty of introducing improved cassava planting materials due to virus diseases that might be carried within the stems of this vegetatively-propagated crop. In an effort to prevent similar bottlenecks in the future, IITA established a Disaster Relief Unit within its Tissue Culture Laboratory at Ibadan, Nigeria in 1996, with start-up funding from USAID. This tissue culture facility can produce disease-free plantlets quickly and on a large scale. These are kept clean in sterile test tubes and can be flown to any country in times of need, often using IITA's own aircraft when commercial flights are not available. Thousands of plantlets have since been delivered to countries all across Africa, accelerating relief and impact.

Once introduced into Rwanda, another cycle of multiplication was made possible largely through the efforts of Service Semencier Selectionnees (SSS), the World Food Programme, and NGOs such as World Vision International (WVI) and CARE, in collaboration with SOH. CARE continued providing advice and assistance on the cultivation of these varieties for years afterwards.

The SOH partners initially met weekly (and later monthly) to assess seed needs in the country and target the right varieties to areas most in need. Partners complemented each other's knowledge: NGOs knew where needs were greatest, CGIAR Center staff knew which seed was best adapted and where, and aid agencies took steps to acquire the seed from external or internal sources (including local and regional markets), guided by seed `source maps' that Center staff had drawn based on their knowledge.

The feedback from farmer assessments later proved the wisdom of the strategy of targeted distributions of locally-adapted varieties. Yield measurements showed that these varieties were more productive for farmers than other relief seed they had been given that had not been carefully chosen for its adaptation (Buruchara et al. 2002).

A unique contribution of SOH was the research that it conducted as an integral part of the aid effort. Those studies illuminated a number of important principles about how seed relief could be improved in the future.