Some of Africa’s most promising crops are ones most of the world has never heard of. Fonio. Bambara groundnut. Jute mallow. Turkey berry. They’re nutritious, they put up with drought and poor soils, but researchers, policymakers and markets have overlooked them.

The Crop Trust’s BOLDER project (Building Opportunities for Lesser-known Diversity in Edible Resources) set out to change that. Working with partners in Benin, Tanzania, Uganda and Ghana, BOLDER helps each country choose its priority opportunity crops and work out what it will take to get them from the field into more mouths.

Between October 2025 and May 2026, Scott Christiansen and I travelled to the four countries to document the value chains of those crops. We followed them from seed to bowl and heard the stories of the people along the way: farmers, researchers, processors, market vendors and the cooks who turned them into some of the finest meals I’ve eaten.

Scott and I go back to 1990. We were neighbours in Aleppo, Syria, while we worked at ICARDA, and we’ve been mates ever since. Across four countries we laughed a lot, ate too many things we couldn’t name, and now and then danced when we probably shouldn’t have.