The Institutionalizing Monitoring of Crop Variety Adoption using Genotyping program (IMAGE) is a six-year program led by country teams in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Ethiopia with the goal of routinizing the use of genotyping, in combination with household surveys, to monitor the rate of improved variety adoption and turnover by male and female small-scale producers. IMAGE is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and managed by Resourced.
IMAGE will assess the varieties that farmers are growing of four staple crops within the three target countries. It will mark the change in varietal adoption and disadoption through recurring surveys and comparative analysis.
The program scope is focused on three partner countries, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and four crops per country.
Maize: Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania
Wheat: Ethiopia
Teff: Ethiopia
Cassava: Nigeria, Tanzania
Common Bean: Ethiopia, Tanzania
Rice: Nigeria, Tanzania
Cowpea: Nigeria
IMAGE will use data from two-rounds of monitoring per crop over six years including the use of past surveys in select cases. These monitoring rounds will generate critical and comparable adoption data in the short-term with the aim of establishing systems within each country for routine monitoring.
The intended end-state is the institutionalization of crop variety monitoring using genotyping in each country by national agencies with national funding and mandate. The technology stack (tools, methods, models, services) developed to enable IMAGE country institutionalization will be portable to enable cost-effective scaling of variety adoption monitoring in additional geographies and crops.
IMAGE provides the opportunity to leverage past monitoring pilots and for cross-country learnings while advancing genetic reference libraries, establishing protocol adoption, and building towards institutionalization over five years. This is done through six objectives:
1. Comparable estimates of varietal adoption and turnover will be generated and made available to stakeholders
2. Standardization of best-practices and supporting technologies
3. Establishment of sustainable business cases
4. Pilot study results on varietal identity preservation in seed value chains for each country-crop combination
5. Institutionalized system of varietal monitoring for long-term, sustainable national partner implementation
6. Generated data used by seed sector stakeholders to make decisions
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