Cultivating the future: IITA’s strategic journey in crop improvement

8 November 2024

The IITA Crop Improvement Team organized a retreat from 21 to 25 October to identify needs, set priorities, plan future actions for IITA 's crop improvement strategy, align with CGIAR 's Breeding for Tomorrow and Genebanks Science Program, and promote team collaboration.

The three-day retreat, moderated by management consultant Milton Kamwendo , brought together IITA experts from diverse fields to develop a strategy for sharing information and integrating new tools, technologies, methods, and best practices.

The retreat's objectives included reviewing feedback from the Breeding Program Assessment Tool (BPAT), prioritizing recommendations, and developing detailed implementation work plans. They also shared updates on progress across all breeding programs and complementary disciplines and fostered collaboration and synergy across complementary disciplines.

In his introductory remarks, Bernard Vanlauwe , IITA Deputy Director General, Research for Development (DDG-R4D), applauded the team for creating a platform that enabled them to come together and deliberate on moving research to a more effective and engaging level. He also congratulated the team for previous achievements, specifically on delivering climate-resilient varieties that mitigate the effects of climate change. "IITA has made significant progress in climate adaptation and crop improvement space. Nonetheless, it is now time to look into cross-disciplinary collaboration to strengthen the breeding efforts, consequently achieving breeding efficiency," he said.

Leena Tripathi , IITA Eastern Africa Hub Director, stated that IITA aims to foster innovation and maintain robust breeding pipelines targeting the development and dissemination of blockbuster varieties, which helps the institute stay ahead of the curve. "It is essential to recognize the importance of a clear crop improvement roadmap necessary for developing crop varieties that meet the needs of farmers," she said. Tripathi explained that now is the best time to draw a consensus on the strategy that would mold the team's activities to achieve set goals.

Hapson Mushoriwa, Head of Breeding at IITA, emphasized during his presentation on the alignment between IITA's refreshed strategy, B4T, Genebanks, and Modern Breeding project 2.0 that IITA is uniquely positioned to leverage internal expertise and capabilities to develop, deliver, and scale up the adoption of superior varieties to arrest the pressing challenges of food and nutrition security.

He stated that a well-defined strategy intended to impact the rate of annual genetic gains across all the IITA breeding programs, and more importantly, the varieties churned out should meet the preferences of the farmers and market.

The retreat featured engaging group discussions, team-building exercises, and presentations emphasizing cross-disciplinary collaboration in breeding, plant health, seed systems, and agronomy. Key topics included research and innovation, climate resilience, food and nutritional security, sustainable practices, collaboration and impact, and future directions.

Contributed by Tolulope Olabode