Rwandan farmers lack improved cassava varieties that are resistant to the main cassava diseases in Rwanda, namely Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD) and Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD), locally known as Kabore and Ububembe, respectively. Cassava is one of the…
Problem/challenge Coffee is a tree crop, which requires good management throughout its growth cycles. Farmers are trained continuously in good agricultural practices to improve coffee productivity. The training offered to farmers introduces a “basket of practices” and climate smart…
The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) started a breeding program for the East Africa Highland Bananas (EAHB) in the mid 1990s that has delivered exciting results including the first-ever hybrids, dubbed…
Achieving food security is central to a reduction in starvation and hunger as well as attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Food security has been conceptualized in different but complementary ways. The World Bank defined it as a…
…Amidst pleas to eradicate gender bias and inequality that affect women’s growth in the field By Adebola Adewole The world marks today, 11 February, as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. The day offers a unique…
Mercy Haruna Wakawa from Borno State, Nigeria, was looking forward to getting a job after graduating from the University of Maiduguri where she studied Food Science and Technology. After so many futile efforts to get a job, and…
Researchers studying the morphological (structure and form) diversity of plantain in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have developed an innovative way to describe plantain diversity using descriptors based on performance, grouping them into main, secondary, and rare descriptors.…
Scientists from IITA and partner institutions have carried out the first known proteomic investigation into plantain. The results of the study are featured in a paper, titled “The plantain proteome, a focus on allele specific proteins obtained from plantain…