Uganda faces an urgent need to accelerate agricultural innovation to boost productivity and support agro-industrial exports. With a rapidly growing population and lagging agricultural output, the country faces mounting challenges to food security, nutrition, and income, compounded by climate change. Strengthening the breeding of resilient and market-adapted crop varieties is seen as a key solution, with the National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO) leading national breeding efforts despite limited resources.
A new grant-based partnership model is demonstrating the potential of targeted funding, national ownership, and expert collaboration in advancing breeding programs. Aligned with Uganda’s National Development Plan IV, this model builds on the foundation of NARO’s partnership with CGIAR since 2019 to modernize breeding for staple crops including maize, beans, cassava, banana, and sweet potato. These crops are essential for food and nutrition security as well as raw materials for agro-industries. Through joint assessments and planning, NARO developed Target Product Profiles (TPPs) to guide the design of ideal crop varieties that meet market demands, while adopting advanced tools such as genomic selection, marker-assisted selection, and the Breeding Management System (BMS).
Infrastructure upgrades, supported by Germany through GIZ as part of the Crops to End Hunger initiative, strengthened NARO’s breeding hubs with mechanization, irrigation, and seed handling facilities. The new grant model introduced by CGIAR’s Breeding for Tomorrow program enabled NARO to lead activities with greater speed and flexibility, integrating them into existing projects and delivering results within just six months. Efforts spanned genotyping, genetic diversity analysis, on-farm testing, and breeding program reorganization across the five key crops.
Significant progress was achieved: maize breeding benefited from improved heterotic pools, new hybrid development, and doubled haploid induction; banana breeding advanced with genetic diversity studies and the first national farmer survey on variety preferences; bean programs refined their market segments and scaled on-farm trials; cassava pipelines integrated disease resistance and adoption studies; and sweet potato programs assessed genetic gain, ensured planting material purity, and documented stakeholder preferences. Cross-cutting achievements included genotyping founder lines for all crops, optimizing breeding schemes, expanding nationwide trials, developing breeding manuals, and conducting cost analyses and training.
The Ugandan experience shows that when national research systems are given direct resources and decision-making authority, they can achieve rapid and impactful outcomes. This grant-based model not only accelerates crop innovation but also serves as a blueprint for empowering national programs to lead in developing the next generation of improved varieties.
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