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This perspective describes the opportunities and challenges of data-driven approaches for crop diversity management (genebanks and breeding) in the context of agricultural research for sustainable development in the Global South. Data-driven approaches build on larger volumes of data and flexible analyses that link different datasets across domains and disciplines. This can lead to more information-rich management of crop diversity, which can address the complex interactions between crop diversity, production environments, and socioeconomic heterogeneity and help to deliver more suitable portfolios of crop diversity to users with highly diverse demands. We describe recent efforts that illustrate the potential of data-driven approaches for crop diversity management. A continued investment in this area should fill remaining gaps and seize opportunities, including i) supporting genebanks to play a more active role in linking with farmers using data-driven approaches; ii) designing low-cost, appropriate technologies for phenotyping; iii) generating more and better gender and socioeconomic data; iv) designing information products to facilitate decision-making; and v) building more capacity in data science. Broad, well-coordinated policies and investments are needed to avoid fragmentation of such capacities and achieve coherence between domains and disciplines so that crop diversity management systems can become more effective in delivering benefits to farmers, consumers, and other users of crop diversity.

Crop breeding programs have often focused on the release of new varieties that target yield improvement to achieve food security and reduce poverty. While continued investments in this objective are justified, there is a need for breeding programs to be increasingly more demand-driven and responsive to the changing customer preferences and population dynamics. This paper analyses the responsiveness of global potato and sweetpotato breeding programs pursued by the International Potato Center (CIP) and its partners to three major development indicators: poverty, malnutrition and gender. The study followed a seed product market segmentation blueprint developed by the Excellence in Breeding platform (EiB) to identify, describe, and estimate the sizes of the market segments at subregional levels. We then estimated the potential poverty and nutrition impacts of investments in the respective market segments. Further, we employed the G+ tools involving multidisciplinary workshops to evaluate the gender-responsiveness of the breeding programs. Our analysis reveals that future investments in breeding programs will achieve greater impacts by developing varieties for market segments and pipelines that have more poor rural people, high stunting rates among children, anemia prevalence among women of reproductive age, and where there is high vitamin A deficiency. In addition, breeding strategies that reduce gender inequality and enhance appropriate change of gender roles (hence gender transformative) are also required.

Influencing policy is an important scaling mechanism. However, if a program is to plausibly claim that it has or can influence policy, it needs to explain how. This is not straightforward because of the complex nature of policy change. Scholars suggest the use of theory to help answer the ‘how’ question. In this article, we show how, in practice, a middle-range policy change theory—Kingdon’s Policy Window theory—helped us model the workings of four outcome trajectories that produced agricultural policy outcomes in four cases. By providing a common framework, the middle-range theory helped accumulate learning from one evaluation to the next, generating specific and generalizable insights in the process. Accumulation learning in this way can help organizations become more convincing in the proposals they write to donors, more accountable and better able to identify and deliver on their goals.

Gender-responsive breeding is a new approach to making sure modern breeding takes advantage of opportunities to improve gender equality in agriculture. Conventional research on the acceptability of modern varieties has scarcely addressed gender differences during adoption studies. Gender-responsive breeding starts from a different premise that adoption and social impact will be enhanced if gender is addressed at early stages of variety design and priority setting in breeding. However, until recently, there was no concrete way to integrate gender considerations into the practice of breeding. This chapter draws lessons for the future from three RTB breeding programs innovating with gender-responsive breeding with a focus on piloting novel tools. The new G+ tools are designed to help gender researchers and breeders make joint, evidence-based decisions about the significance of gender differences for customer targeting and trait prioritization in variety development. Their piloting in the context of each program’s practice of gender-responsive breeding throws light on some valuable good practices that contributed to successful innovation.

Collaborative programs that facilitate innovation to deliver value at scale require attention to effective program design, management, governance, and leadership. The CGIAR has experimented with different collaborative program design options over its 50-year history, most recently with the CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) implemented from 2012 to 2021. This chapter examines the structure and processes of the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB). It unpacks the constituent institutional innovations that underpinned the RTB program, their key design principles, how they evolved over the 10 years of the program, the innovations achieved, and the outcomes to which they contributed. Turbulence and transformations in the CGIAR system influenced the CRPs’ emergence, design, and delivery. In this chapter, we discuss the RTB approach to collaborative governance and management as complex institutional innovations operating within this broader, dynamic system. This includes attention to opportunities, limitations, and other contextual factors influencing RTB’s work. Institutional innovations include stakeholder consultations and priority setting, a portfolio organized by aggregated innovations, or clusters of activities, articulated flagship projects, incentive funding, a dynamic interactive communication ability, and programmatic embedding of strategic and integrated gender research. RTB’s design, governance, and management innovations added value to the combined achievements of the participating centers in science and research for development outcomes, described in the following chapters.

The article “The Potato of the Future: Opportunities and Challenges in Sustainable Agri-food Systems”, written by André Devaux, Jean-Pierre Goffart, Peter Kromann, Jorge Andrade-Piedra, Vivian Polar, and Guy Hareau, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 24 July 2021 without open access. With the author(s)’ decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on 23 September 2021 to © The Author(s) 2021 and the article is forthwith distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0.

Root, tuber, and banana (RT&B) crops play a critical role in food and nutrition security in developing countries, increasingly so in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). They have great potential to contribute to alleviate poverty, improve health and nutrition, and enhance the resilience of smallholder farmers to climate change. However, RT&Bs are characterized by unique challenges including vegetative propagation, genetic complexity, and postharvest constraints with bulkiness and perishability, compared to cereals. They are also characterized by a high yield potential and the ability to deliver micronutrients at large scale. However, until recently they have suffered from neglect in both investment and research. The CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas, which operated from 2012 to 2021, represented a novel and successful innovation model within the agricultural research for development domain not only in scientific terms but also from an organizational perspective. This program built upon the uniqueness of the RT&B crops and contributed to much of the progress reported in the book. This chapter provides an overview of challenges and opportunities facing RT&B crops in processing, marketing and distribution, enhancing productivity, and improving livelihoods. It presents underlying concepts for gender and scaling that feature prominently throughout the book, as well as an updated stance on innovation, touching base on the topic of the jobs to be done. The chapter concludes with an overview and highlights of the different sections and chapters in the remainder of the book.

This paper develops a novel approach called Outcome Trajectory Evaluation (OTE) in response to the long-causal-chain problem confronting the evaluation of research for development (R4D) projects. OTE strives to tackle four issues resulting from the common practice of evaluating R4D projects based on theory of change developed at the start. The approach was developed iteratively while conducting four evaluations of policy-related outcomes claimed by the CGIAR, a global R4D organization. The first step is to use a middle-range theory (MRT), based on “grand” social science theory, to help delineate and understand the trajectory that generated the set of outcomes being evaluated. The second step is to then identify project contribution to that trajectory. Other types of theory-driven evaluation (TDE) are single step: they model how projects achieve outcomes without first considering the overarching causal mechanism—the outcome trajectory—from which the outcomes emerged. The use of an MRT allowed us to accrue learning from one evaluation to the next.

Two metrics widely used to measure the overall impact of breeding programs are: (i) adoption of modern varieties as a percentage of the total area under the crop, and (ii) the area‐weighted varietal age of a crop in a particular country or region, estimated as the average time since the release of varieties, weighted by the area across which they are adopted. The graph compares this data for roots tubers and bananas with other crops based on information gathered in 2010 (Walker & Alwang, 2015). The paper provides an update through case studies of varietal change in banana, cassava, potato, sweetpotato and yam., Summary This review of the literature on varietal change in sub‐Saharan Africa looks in detail at adoption of new varieties of bananas in Uganda, cassava in Nigeria, potato in Kenya, sweetpotato in Uganda and yams in Côte d’Ivoire. The review explored three hypotheses about drivers of varietal change. There was a strong confirmation for the hypothesis that insufficient priority given to consumer‐preferred traits by breeding programmes contributes to the limited uptake of modern varieties (MVs) and low varietal turnover. Lack of evidence meant the second hypothesis of insufficient attention to understanding and responding to gender differences in consumer preferences for quality and post‐harvest traits was unresolved. The evidence on the third hypothesis about the informal seed system contributing to slow uptake of MVs was mixed. In some cases, the informal system has contributed to rapid uptake of MVs, but often it appears to be a barrier with inconsistent varietal naming a major challenge.

Crop diversity contributes to yield stability and nutrition security and is valued for its potential use in breeding improved varieties and adaptation to future climates. Women across the globe contribute to biodiversity conservation, and, in the Central Andes region, the cradle of potato diversity, rural women play a vital role in the management of a wealth of native potato diversity. To examine how gender roles and traditions influence the agricultural and conservation practices of male and female custodians of native potato diversity, we undertook a qualitative study in eight farming communities high in the Andes, in the Pasco region of Peru. This article reviews agricultural and crop diversity management practices, farmer motivations for conserving potato diversity, the role that agrobiodiversity plays in family diets and economies, and support of in situ conservation by external actors. It examines how gender norms limit the potential of women to fully benefit from the crop and argues for more gender-responsive approaches that empower both women and men, enable women to overcome barriers, and contribute to a more inclusive, community-based management of agrobiodiversity that ensures its long-term conservation and contribution to community development and well-being.