Tropical Legumes - III (TL III)

E Monyo and RK Varshney

Improving livelihoods for smallholder farmers: Enhanced grain legume productivity and

production in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia

Presented at the ICRISAT ESA Regional In-house 26 - 27 April, 2016

TL III Focus Geographies and Crops

Position of TL in the BMGF Grant potfolio

– The largest legume grant in the Foundation’s grant system

– Is one of few selected BMGF Sentinel Grants identified to provide learning to the BMGF overall Agric. Dev. investment

– TL III (the 3rd phase of the project now in its 8th year) officially started in April 2015

TLIII OUTCOMES• Women’s production capacities enhanced and gender yield

gap in legume systems closed by 20% • ICRISAT groundnut and chickpea, CIAT common beans and IITA

cowpea have shown significant improvements in effectiveness• Realized productivity and production gains (20 – 50%) for

groundnut, chickpea, cowpea and common bean over improved and local varieties in focus geographies

• Delivery partners are producing and disseminating quality seeds of improved varieties of all 4 legumes in sufficient quantities to cover 20% of the area cropped with over half the beneficiary SHF being women

Management W/plan activities and achievements for 2015

• Implementing a multi-stakeholder project launch workshop

• Implementing National Annual Planning meetings• Curation and dissemination of TL-III Data as global

public goods• Communicating TL-III project progress, achievements

and impact• Supporting breeding pipelines for groundnuts,

cowpea, common bean, and chickpea in target TL-III countries

• Management and reporting of Project achievements

TL III Theory of Change

Challenges, Constraints, Risks & Mitigations

• It has taken long to fill the project positions – hence the project is off to a slow start (The gender scientist has not joined to-date and gender related research activities are behind schedule)

• Ongoing security and instability in parts of Mali and Nigeria

• Drought in Ethiopia (ElNino effect of 2015) .

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

THANKS