For millions of people across Africa, a healthy bunch of bananas on the farm or a bag of aflatoxin-free maize at the market may seem like ordinary sights. Yet behind these everyday realities are decades of scientific research, innovation,…
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banana
The Program for Seed System Innovations for Vegetatively Propagated Crops in Africa (PROSSIVA) has trained Nigeria’s first cohort of banana and plantain seed entrepreneurs, marking an important milestone in efforts to strengthen the country’s emerging formal seed system. The…
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Partners review innovation research achievements for vegetatively propagated crop seed systems and plan for 2024
Following the first year of implementation, the Program for Seed System Innovation for Vegetatively-propagated Crops in Africa (PROSSIVA) held its annual review and planning meeting from 12 to 14 December 2023 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.…
Digital tools ICT4BXW
Harnessing Digital Innovation: Celebrating the Legacy of the ICT4BXW Project in Banana Agronomy
ICT4BXW held a closing workshop, marking the end of a six-year project that ran from 2018 through 2023. The project focused on developing and deploying digital tools to combat Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW) disease in Rwanda. The end-of-project workshop…
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…
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.…
Central Africa featured Western Africa
IITA and partners conduct first proteomic investigation in plantain and banana
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…
Three years after starting its activities, the IITA banana breeding team based in Arusha-Tanzania has planted its first banana hybrids for field evaluation. While this is a major milestone for the program, it also underscores the complexity and slow…