The second phase of the Yam Improvement for Income and Food Security in West Africa (YIIFSWA II) project was implemented through a strong collaboration between research and private sector. Private seed companies were provided with a wide variety of training and development activities on good agronomic practices (GAPs). However, the effects of the training activities were yet to be evaluated.

Effective altruism is an ethical framework for identifying the greatest potential benefits from investments. Here, we apply effective altruism concepts to maximize research benefits through identification of priority stakeholders, pathosystems, and research questions and technologies.

The Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) project is administered by the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). AICCRA is a project that helps deliver a climate-smart African future driven by science and innovation in agriculture. AICCRA builds on 50 years of CGIAR innovation, AICCRA works to scale climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and climate information services (CIS) that reach millions of smallholder farmers in Africa.

As part of the Learning Platform (LP2) Participatory evaluation of Climate-Smart Agricultural (CSA) practices and technologies across the AR4D Climate-Smart Villages (CSVs) network, CCAFS Flagship 2 designed a new Integrated Climate-Smart Monitoring Framework to supports a global, systemic and standardized effort to build context-specific evidence on uptake of CSA options and the associated (perceived) outcomes at household and farm level.

In 2020 the CGIAR CAS Secretariat is conducting independent reviews of the 12 CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs), including this one of CCAFS. The reviews will provide information on quality of science and effectiveness in each CRP. This review covers the Phase II years of 2017 through 2019, with a view to identifying lessons for future research modalities.

Bioversity International’s financial mandate includes maintaining accountability and transparency in its finances, and to evaluate and communicate direct impact from our work to our donors, partners and the wider research and development community.

The challenges of bee research in Asia are unique and severe, reflecting different cultures, landscapes, and faunas. Strategies and frameworks developed in North America or Europe may not prove applicable. Virtually none of these species have been assessed by the IUCN and there is a paucity of public data on even the basics of bee distribution. If we do not know the species present, their distribution and threats, we cannot protect them, but our knowledge base is vanishingly small in Asia compared to the rest of the world.

Urbanization is an extreme human activity and is expanding worldwide, consequently increasing the attention of scientists across research areas of urban ecology. Recent studies have warned of the lack of information from certain regions, particularly Africa, which is rapidly urbanizing. Thus, we did a detailed literature search to determine the state of knowledge in African urban ecology in the last century.

Gender dynamics and norms are crucial for rural livelihoods and achieving food security. While norms related to ownership, management, product distribution, and sales methods are prevalent in dairy production, more research needs to be conducted in this area. This study hypothesized that innovative technologies introduced without considering gender dynamics and norms may limit the extent of transformative change.

The Building a Sustainable, Integrated Seed System for Cassava in Nigeria (BASICS) was a five-year
(2016-2020) project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that worked to strengthen all
components of the cassava seed value chain. The project was led and implemented by the CGIAR
program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas in partnership with International Institute of Tropical
Agriculture (IITA), National Agricultural Seeds Council (NASC), National Root Crops Research Institute

As more Voluntary Sustainability Standards/Systems (VSS) increase their efforts to address gender inequality in agri-food value chains, the timing is ripe to reflect on progress to inform future strategies and research. This paper revisits the body of evidence on VSS and gender equality through the lens of SDG5.5 specifically, to identify if and especially how VSS may support women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership in decision-making in rural communities.