A national programme for seed sector resilience.
Agriculture is the backbone of the Burundian economy and supports close to ninety per cent of the population, yet more than half of households face chronic food insecurity. The seed sector is at the centre of any sustainable response. Variety degeneration, climate stress, dispersed actors, and the absence of unified information systems weaken the availability of certified seed across the country.
FAO Burundi, with the African Development Bank and the Ministry of Environment, Agriculture and Livestock, commissioned a single national platform to address three challenges at once. Track every seed lot from pre basic stage to certified distribution. Bring transparency to actors, production sites, points of sale, and stocks. And produce reliable statistics on production, distribution, and sales to guide public and private decisions.
The mandate. Replace fragmented Excel spreadsheets and partial standalone tools with one national digital backbone, accessible to seven distinct user profiles, covering all eighteen provinces, with full source code and documentation transferred to the Ministry to guarantee technological sovereignty.
One platform for the entire seed value chain.
PANEOTECH and ASER Technologies designed, built, and deployed Imbuto, the national digital platform that now serves as the backbone of the Burundi seed sector. The system is in production at https://pngs.bi and is used by ministerial directorates, the certification authority, the national research institute, multipliers, and provincial agricultural bureaus.
National Actor Registry
One authoritative repository for laboratories, multipliers, importers, provincial bureaus, and points of sale, with structured profiles, agreement status, and inspection history.
Variety Catalogue
Digital catalogue of registered varieties enriched with agronomic data, synchronised with the national certification authority for homologation, and consultable by farmers and partners.
Lot by Lot Traceability
Every seed lot receives a unique identifier. Movements are timestamped and linked to the producer, the certificate, and the location, from pre basic stage to certified distribution.
Analytical Dashboards
Real time consolidation of stocks, certifications, inspections, and sales, with exportable reports in PDF and Excel for institutional reporting and donor accountability.
The platform supports seven distinct user profiles with role based permissions. Administrator, producer, importer, farmer, certifier, seed commission, and observer. Each profile has a workflow tailored to its responsibilities, from lot declaration and certification through to public consultation and read only oversight.
A modern stack built for sovereignty.
Imbuto runs on a Node.js and TypeScript backend designed around a hexagonal architecture that isolates business logic from external dependencies, with a MongoDB document store and a React TypeScript frontend packaged as a Progressive Web App for use in low connectivity provinces. The stack was selected for long term maintainability and for the Ministry's capacity to operate it independently after handover.
Hexagonal backend
A strict separation between domain logic and infrastructure. REST APIs cover the actor registry, lot traceability, variety catalogue, and analytical dashboards, with full OpenAPI documentation for downstream integrations.
Containerised delivery
Each microservice is containerised with Docker. A continuous integration pipeline runs unit, integration, and load tests on every commit, then builds and deploys images to auto scaling cloud instances.
Defence in depth
A managed CDN and web application firewall protects public entry points and absorbs traffic spikes. Static analysis, dependency scanning, and automated security tests guard against common vulnerabilities including injection, cross site scripting, and broken authentication.
Resilient operations
Nightly snapshots replicate the production database to encrypted offline storage, with documented restore procedures. The Progressive Web App enables provincial inspectors to capture data offline and synchronise when connectivity returns.
Built for the operational reality of rural Burundi.
Delivery followed a thirteen week agile cycle structured around weekly sprints, with collaborative diagnostic, architecture and prototype design, incremental build, full test campaign covering unit, integration, load, and user acceptance, then production deployment. Two days of in person training in Bujumbura on the sixth and seventh of May 2025 brought together administrators from ministerial directorates, the certification authority, the research institute, multipliers, importers, and the FAO project team.
Partners and institutional ownership.
Imbuto was delivered by the consortium of PANEOTECH and ASER Technologies for FAO Burundi, with co financing from the African Development Bank and government leadership from the Ministry of Environment, Agriculture and Livestock. The platform is in production, operated by ministerial and certification authority staff, with full source code and documentation transferred to the Ministry. Six months of post deployment application support is in place.
