{"id":13722,"date":"2026-06-20T12:30:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T12:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.iita.org\/news-item\/iita-and-bayer-launch-modern-breeding-project\/"},"modified":"2026-06-29T21:36:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T21:36:44","slug":"iita-and-bayer-launch-modern-breeding-project","status":"publish","type":"news-item","link":"https:\/\/iita.org\/fr\/news-item\/iita-and-bayer-launch-modern-breeding-project\/","title":{"rendered":"IITA and Bayer launch modern breeding project"},"content":{"rendered":"\"IITAYield improvement of important African food crops will get a boost with the launch of a new project to be implemented by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in collaboration with Bayer<\/a>.\n\nKnown as Modern Breeding Project (MBP), the project will focus on ensuring that IITA mandate crops\u2014cassava, maize, cowpea, banana, yam, and soybean\u2014achieve the highest yield possible, leading to increased crop productivity on farms.\n\nMichael Abberton<\/a>, Head of CGIAR-IITA\u2019s Genetic Resources Center and the project lead, explains: \u201cThe 30-month project will build a more effective plant breeding system that develops superior cultivars for critical African crops through a partnership with a leading private-sector seed company\u2014Bayer.\u201d\n\nThrough this $1.2 million crop improvement project funded by the Fondation Bill & Melinda Gates<\/a>, IITA will modernize its suite of breeding programs. Crop breeding is central for achieving IITA\u2019s goals of increased productivity, economic growth, and poverty reduction to support the agricultural transformation of Africa. The project expects to improve both technical and organizational elements patterned after models and best practices from Bayer.\n\nThe Bayer partnership brings private sector perspective and approaches to the project to help create efficiency-driven programs in CGIAR<\/a>. It will also leverage $1.2 M of in-kind<\/em> support from Bayer, mostly in the form of time of skills-based volunteers to enable IITA to rapidly incorporate the tools and approaches from the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding<\/a> (EiB) platform.\n\nThe project\u2019s beneficiaries are the over 100 million smallholder farmers who grow IITA\u2019s mandate crops on about 60 million hectares in the humid to semiarid zones of sub-Saharan Africa. These cover countries such as Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.\n\nBayer will assist IITA with research workflow management, product development, implementation of shared services, and general organizational insights. Over the last decade, Bayer has implemented protocols that have increased efficiency in their organization, and they will draw on these lessons to enable IITA to improve its organizational effectiveness as well.\n\n\u201cIn supporting Bayer\u2019s mission Health for All, Hunger for None<\/em>, we look forward to continuing our engagement with IITA to help achieve food security in Africa,\u201d added Mike Graham, Head of Breeding for the Crop Science division of Bayer. \u201cBy helping IITA scientists provide solutions for smallholder farmers, we can help be part of the solution to growth and progress for IITA and its partners.\u201d\n\nThe project, which focuses on six crops, positions IITA for future investments that are more institutional and aligned to the anticipated One CGIAR<\/a>.\n\nAlong with EiB<\/a>, the project will ensure that the basic requirements of high-quality data from field experiments are in place and managed in a timely and efficient manner. It will further facilitate the implementation of the institutional Breeding Program Improvement Plan (BPIP).\n\n\"IITA\n\nThe grant will help IITA to achieve the following outcomes:\n