RTB Reports

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    Gender Food Mapping for Boiled Sweetpotato in Mozambique. RTB Technical Report
    (Report, 2021-08) Mayanja, S.; Tinyiro, E.S.; Kisakye, S.; Anena, B.; Asasira, M.; Abdul, N.; Mulwa, C.K.; Kawarazuka, Nozomi; Andrade, M.I.
    Sweetpotato breeders have strived to breed varieties that address productivity challenges that farmers face in SSA. However, adoption rates for the new varieties are usually low. This has been attributed to the fact that such varieties rarely meet the gendered preferences of the end users in terms of preferred traits and characteristics. This study sought to identify key preferred traits and characteristics by women and men farmers in Manhica and Marracuenne districts, Mozambique. Specifically, the study mapped the livelihood characteristics of the respondents by sex and region in relation to preferred sweetpotato varieties at three levels: the raw root, during processing and the boiled root. Findings show that though sweetpotato was cultivated by all three identified wealth groups, it was of greater importance to the poor and reasonably well-off wealth categories. The moderately well-off category grew the crop mostly for sale, while the poor category produced it for mostly for food. Sweetpotato plots were jointly managed in most households but with demarcated production activities. Sweetpotato was the most important crop for women in Manhiça and for men in Marracuene; while men in Manhiça and women in Marracuene ranked it second. Variety preference: The most preferred variety was N’santimuni and this cut across gender, wealth category and region. In though, one men FGD highlighted that women mostly preferred local varieties such as N’santimuni, Cidinha and Mulumuzani. Likewise, the women FGD in the same location mentioned Bobole, Chihav, Isaura, Manhiça, Melinda and Jane as men’s preferred varieties. In Marracuene, there were no differences for varietal preferences amongst women. There were minimal variations in in the varieties grown given the seed sharing practices across the board. Access to new sweetpotato varieties: New sweetpotato varieties were receive through extension services and many respondents indicated that they were growing them. However, in some instances, “farmer to farmer sharing strategy” was reportedly being adopted in order to spread these varieties in the community. In Marracuene for example women respondents reported having received OFSP varieties such as Martinha, Victória, Cidinha and Manhiça as well as some purple-fleshed varieties. In Manhiça, both men and women mentioned that women made the decisions on adoption and production of new sweetpotato potato varieties. New Variety liking and ranking: In Manhiça for example, men liked the new varieties because of good taste, high yields and in rich in Vitamins; in descending order. Women ranked their preferences as high yields, good taste and market preferred. Importantly, women respondents were variety specific when mentioning their preferences: for example, Ininda had a good taste (roots and leaves), Esther presented roots with good dry matter content like cooked eggs, Irene had vitamins, high yield and good taste, Amélia high yield and good taste (roots and leaves) while Melinda was a high yielding with good taste (roots and leaves). In Marracuene, men preferred characteristics were good taste, rich in vitamins and good for processing. Women ranked good taste, dry matter and rich in vitamins as their most preferred characteristics. High yields featured only in Manhiça; possibly because of the district’s greater marketing focus for sweetpotato. Good sweetpotato characteristics: Which farmers considered when selecting a variety to grow included agronomic traits such as early maturity, high yields and resistant to weevils; postharvest such as high dry matter, no cracks on peel and market preferred; processing, physio-chemical (vitamin rich) and sensory characteristics (good taste, high dry matter). In Manhiça, men prioritized market preferred, dry matter and vitamin rich, while women prioritized dry matter, high yields and market preferred. Men in Marracuene prioritized good taste, good to process and drought tolerance, while women ranked market preferred, high yield and good taste. *Market preference was explained to mean: a good root which was described as beautiful (having a smooth skin and not weevil damage), reasonable size (medium between one and two fists), tasty, easy to cook, having many on farm buyers, and short time spent to sell it off in the market. Varieties with the preferred characteristics: Included N’satimuni, Bowole for men and women in Manhiça, while women in Marracuene selected N’satimuni; Bowole and OFSP tying in second place. For Marracuene men N’satimuni came first followed by OFSP and Lilas in second place. Effect of preferred characteristics on women’s labour, decision making and income control: Men perceived that the preferred characteristics increased market preference, and thus had a positive impact on women’s labour as they were motivated to work harder and earn more income. The early maturing varieties were said to be good for women, as they provided food at a time when stocks were running low, but increased their labour burden. Women perceived that most of the preferred characteristics led to increased labour load, since they were responsible for sweetpotato production. Nonetheless, this was perceived positively given the income anticipated from increased sales of quality roots. The tradeoff for labour was less time for household chores which were relegated to children; and hire of casual labourers were resources were available. With regards to decision making, it was unanimously agreed that women were in charge of production and marketing decisions. However, control of income so earned was perceived to be a joint decision. What characteristics make a good boiled sweetpotato? When selecting the raw root: Men in Marracuene ranked smooth skin, good size, dry matter and good taste as the most important characteristics, while for women good size, smooth skin and no damages were selected. In Manhica, women selected dry matter, not rotten and good taste, while for men it was smooth skin, good size and dry matter. At processing: for men, important characteristics at this stage were good taste, smooth skin and dry matter while for women it was no fibers, good, no damages and smooth skin Ready to eat: boiled sweetpotato was consumed with tea and salad, or mashed and mixed with groundnuts (Xiguinha). Important characteristics that made a good boiled sweetpotato for men were easy to peel, with good dry matter, goo aroma and beautiful smooth skin. Women ranked good dry matter, low fibre content, smooth skin and not rotten as the most important characteristics. In summary, though there were differences in the ranking of preferred characteristics and varieties for men and women, and across regions; these differences would not create difficulties in developing a new product profile. Breeders should nonetheless be cognizant of the characteristics that make the local variety N’santimuni stand out for women when breeding for a replacement candidate, as they in ranking; while some are different from men’s. Whereas absence of fiber is important for women for example, this does not feature in men’s preferred final product characteristics nor at processing. Given women’s position in the sweetpotato value chain, prioritizing their preferred characteristics in the product profile could lead to higher adoption of new varieties. For CIP, it is gratifying that farmers in Mozambique are increasingly accepting the OFSP varieties given the high ranking amongst preferred varieties. Again, good characteristics mentioned by women for the various OFSP varieties need to be capitalized on for future OFSP product profiles.
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    Strategy for adoption of zero-tillage potato cultivation technology in Assam. RTB Policy Paper
    (Report, 2023-03) Kumar, B.; Goswami, B.S.; Minhas, J.S.
    Assam has rich soil and good natural resources for implementing climate-resilient agricultural practices to enhance potato production. Potato cultivation in the district occupies 1,03,812 hectares of land which, in 2015-2016, produced about 6,94,002 metric tons of potatoes as recorded by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Government of Assam1. This is quite low compared to the national average of 22 metric tons per hectare (NHB 2018). There are several reasons for the lower production of potato in Assam including low potato seed availability and low seed quality, as well as a lack of scientific knowledge on potato cultivation and pest and disease management. The Assam Agri-business and Rural Transform (APART) is a program established to develop a potato value chain in Assam to benefit farmers including addressing constraints and through farmer support to overcome them. It is carried out with support from the International Potato Center (CIP) which provides consultancy services to the Government of Assam. CIP is committed to providing cost-effective, sustainable, climate-resilient, and appropriate technological solutions to meet the unique challenges facing enhancing potato cultivation and productivity in Assam. This paper focuses on how CIP technologies can be widely disseminated to farmers in Assam in relation to current potato cultivation practices. It provides a road map for the state government to engage a large number of farmers in zero-tillage potato cultivation technology by looking at farmers’ current practices.
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    The impact of COVID-19 on labor migration and the roles of small-scale farming in the pandemic in Vietnam
    (Report, 2021-12) Kawarazuka, Nozomi; Bui, Trang; Phan, CH.; Hoang, TX.
    Drawing on in-depth interviews of migrant workers and their families in rural Vietnam, this study explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on transnational and rural-urban migration as well as the role of small-scale farming in remittance-receiving households. Fieldwork was conducted in two provinces: the Son La province where ethnic minority women and men work in urban construction sites, and the Ha Tinh province where young men work in East Asia, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Research findings show that in Son La, the pandemic exacerbated the already precarious lives and livelihoods of labor migrants, especially women and children. On the other hand, in Ha Tinh non-market-oriented small-scale farming and livestock production support remittance-receiving households, thereby limiting the impact of reduced remittances from transnational migration in the short-term. In both study sites, the pandemic did not change respondents’ perceptions of livelihood strategies. Labor migration remains the only available option for Son La farmers from the poor households to provide for their families and the best option for many young men in Ha Tinh to gain financial autonomy. These individuals are deeply affected by structural injustice in the commodification of the labor market, which is inherently unequal and exploitative. Current agricultural development must offer diverse options to accommodate the various needs of marginalized households that depend on off-farm incomes as well as small-scale farming.
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    Women’s roles and opportunities in cassava value chains in Son La province in Vietnam: A technical report
    (Report, 2021-11) Kawarazuka, Nozomi; Bui, Trang; Phan, CH.; Hoang, TX.
    Cassava is a major export-oriented cash crop in Vietnam. Unlike other cash crops, such as coffee, fruits, and maize, cassava requires limited agricultural input and labour and can grow in nutrient-poor uplands. Research on cassava breeding, seed systems and value chains in Southeast Asia is increasingly focused on market-oriented aspects such as developing hybrid varieties favourable to the cassava starch industry, disease control on large scale farms, and seed systems driven by the private sector. However, in the northern mountainous areas of Vietnam, ethnic minority farmers use cassava roots, leaves and sticks for numerous reasons, including starch production, fish and animal feed, firewood, and home consumption. Women play significant roles in those non market-oriented activities (often collecting left-over small roots in the field, drying roots, and cutting leaves and stems) but little is known about how this work influences women’s roles, decision-making and opportunities in cassava value chains. Hence, this study provides that data with an eye to see how women may find more opportunity for creating small business enterprises with cassava. Fieldwork was conducted in July 2021 in the Chieng La commune (Thuan Chau district) and the Muong Bon Commune (Mai Son district). Findings show that although women are less involved in decision making on cassava production and overall agricultural investment, they play important roles in cassava production and post-harvest activities. Therefore, it is extremely important to collect and analyze women’s preferences, concerns and constraints in cassava research and interventions. In the conclusion, we highlight additional areas for research on this topic.
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    Sweetpotato in diverse economies: Women farmers in Ha Tinh province, Vietnam
    (Report, 2021-11) Kawarazuka, Nozomi; Bui, Trang
    Linking smallholder farmers to markets has been one of the major approaches to improving food security. This approach is often combined with women’s empowerment as well by emphasizing women’s greater involvement in market-oriented agriculture. However, it implicitly undervalues women’s roles in non-market-oriented agriculture and unpaid family labor. This is partly because current mainstream value-chain analyses are premised on a capitalist economy that separates production from the non-capitalist form of all activities. The aim of this study is to gain a more nuanced understanding of non- or less-market oriented agricultural activities led by women farmers and the oft-neglected value of these activities in rural households. The study employs the concept of diverse economies which consider non-market-oriented activities as part of various economic systems, including subsistence farming, exchange of food, and exchange of labor. A case study was conducted in a community in the Ha Tinh province in Vietnam in April 2021, when COVID-19 had little impact on agriculture. Findings show that women manage non-market-oriented sweetpotato production, which is central to maintaining a local seed system, a reciprocal support system, and livestock production. Furthermore, women choose the best varieties of sweetpotato and use their own social networks for obtaining planting materials and distributing the sweetpotato harvest, enabling women to control both agricultural production and the distribution of benefits. In this context, shifting to commercial agriculture is not a desired form of agricultural development for women. Interventions in agricultural value chains require careful considerations of women’s aspirations and household strategies embedded in broad production and reproduction within extended and intergenerational family relations.
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    ICT4BXW. Report on baseline survey of banana farmers in Rwanda
    (Report, 2018-10) McCampbell, M.; Adewopo, Julius
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    Descriptors for Documenting Innovations and their Contributions to Impact
    (Report, 2021-07) Sartas, Murat; Zervas, P.; Konstantinidis, S.; Sarfatti, P.; Schut, Marc; Bonaiuti, Enrico; Naziri, D.; Clarke, V.
    The CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers, and Bananas (RTB) has been one of the leading CGIAR research programs in designing, developing, and using complexity-sensitive tools and practices that inform innovation management decisions in CGIAR. In addition to Scaling Readiness1 , which has been adopted by One CGIAR2 , several CGIAR centers3 , and CGIAR research programs4 , RTB has developed Scaling Fund5 as an instrument to nurture the innovations that have a significant potential for Scaling. RTB has also developed many other innovations that address innovation portfolio management, such as research impact forecasts6 and gender7 . Building on its experience in developing innovation management tools and practices, RTB has recently commissioned an interdisciplinary team, the RTB Catalog Team, to develop prototypes of a novel, systematic, innovation documentation framework and an online portal featuring key innovations generated by the program since 2015. The prototypes will be essential tools for establishing a new innovation management architecture that better serves the needs of One CGIAR by systematizing the existing CGIAR digital resources such as CLARISA, MEL, MARLO, and complementing them with an application tested using the diverse innovations in the RTB portfolio. In June 2021, two milestones were completed for developing the prototypes: the Methodology that describes the conceptual model and design principles and the Review of Digital Data Resources on Innovation and Impact. This document presents the third major milestone for developing the prototypes: Descriptors for Documenting Innovations and their Contributions to Impact. Following an introduction and description of the method, this paper presents the profiles and descriptions of each of the shortlisted innovation and impact-related descriptors, selected from a longer list of 255 identified by the RTB Innovation Catalog Team from 19 global digital resources.
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    A Review of Digital Data Resources on Innovation and Impact
    (Report, 2021-06) Sartas, Murat; Zervas, P.; Sotiris, P.; Sarfatti, P.; Schut, Marc; Bonaiuti, Enrico; Clarke, V.; Negroustoueva, S.
    The CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers, and Bananas (RTB) has commissioned a study to develop an innovation catalog to present its innovation portfolio to the international scientific and development community and to support ongoing efforts to establish an innovation management architecture in CGIAR. The study team has been tasked with designing an application model that can inform the innovation and impact management architecture of CGIAR and test it within the RTB innovation portfolio leading to an RTB Innovation Catalog that can be used as an example for future work. Guided by the recently finalized work methodology, the interdisciplinary research and technical team members have reviewed existing digital resources, i.e. web portals and databases that present the social innovations across multiple sectors such as agriculture, food, environment, health, and energy to the international research-for-development and impact investment communities. This document describes the methods and the findings of this review. It shows the profiles, features, and data provided by the digital resources; compares and contrasts them by assessing their relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, functionality, and formats. It shows that, although there are a few features that most existing digital resourcesshare, i.e. being hosted by international organizations, having easy to-navigate interfaces, and providing limited filtering and search options, there are significant differences between them. The digital resources focus on different subsets of innovation-related information and provide different levels of granularity. The review concludes that to present its innovations across the broad spectrum of digital resources, the RTB Program and CGIAR need to use rich metadata sets with a few different interface and export options to be customized based on the profile of individual, essential digital resources of interest.
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    RTB Innovation Catalog - Method and Work Plan
    (Report, 2021-05) Sarfatti, P.; Bonaiuti, Enrico; Sartas, Murat; Schut, Marc; Sotiris, P.
    This document describes the method for building RTB’s Innovation Catalog. We start by defining the objectives of this research, the problems and the challenges we are addressing. Most CGIAR innovations are documented in a way that does not favor their wider use. This has limited the contribution of CGIAR innovations to the developmental challenges that CGIAR investors demand. The goal of this research is to contribute to the CGIAR innovation management system that will enable the deployment of innovations faster, at a larger scale, and a reduced cost, having a more significant impact where they are needed the most. The purpose of the Innovation Catalog is to document RTB innovations, in a way that is easily accessible, and understandable. The Catalog will be user-friendly (see definition in Section 6.2). Technical terms, indicators, and categories will be standardized. The type of language and depth of information will be tailored to different types of users. The RTB Innovation Catalog will be developed using a tailor-made Scaling Readiness framework. Individual RTB innovations are the building blocks of the Innovation Catalog. Contextual information and connection to innovation packages will be documented for a few of the innovations.
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    Business skills training guide for potato farmer organizations and cooperatives: A guide for business skills and enterprise development
    (Report, 2021-03) Borus, D.; Mutiso, M.
    This training guide was developed by the potato component of the Accelerated Value Chain Development (AVCD) program with contributions from Edward Mwakio, a business skills consultant, and from county agribusiness development officers in the six project intervention counties. Preparation of this guide is based on the experience and the feedback from different trainers and participants.
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    Regulatory Options to Improve Seed Systems for Vegetatively Propagated Crops in Developing Countries
    (Report, 2021-06) Spielman, David J.; Gatto, M.; Wossen, T.; McEwan, M.; Abdoulaye, Tahirou; Maredia, Mywish K.; Hareau, Guy
    In many developing countries, smallholder farmers cultivating vegetatively propagated crops (VPCs) have limited access to quality planting material. This constraint can limit both the yield of and returns on VPC cultivation. Yet policy and regulatory initiatives designed to strengthen access to quality VPC planting materials have been relatively unsuccessful to date. Part of the problem is the unique biological and economic characteristics of vegetative propagation and its distinctness from cereal crops, which dominate narratives on seed system reforms. Drawing on qualitative analysis of policy and practice, this study examines reform options related to quality assurance regulations in four crop-country combinations: cassava in Nigeria and Vietnam, and potato in Kenya and Vietnam. The study highlights theory and evidence on existing models of regulation; alternative models that may better incentivize cost-effective multiplication and distribution; and recommendations for policy, regulation, and investment in VPC seed markets. Findings indicate that regulations designed around strict and centralized quality control systems tend to limit market size, while more localized production systems are limited by both capacity and reach. These findings suggest the need for alternatives that balance a permissive regulatory regime with decentralized production systems, grassroots capacity development, market surveillance, and systems that integrate internal (producer-level) quality assurance with external (regulatory) quality assurance.
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    Senior Expert Contributions to One CGIAR Program Development: Private Sector Engagement
    (Report, 2021-02) Cummings, Sarah; Dentoni, Domenico
    One of the foundations of the forthcoming OneCGIAR lays in its ambition to deepen engagement with the private sector as a key pathway to achieve greater impact at scale towards the achievement of the SDGs. While it is established that the private sector will be central in the transformation of agri-food systems, the current debate revolves on how research bodies and public policies engaging can (or should) change their practices of engagement with the private sector; and how this would translate into more rapid, inclusive and transformative scaling processes towards the achievement of the SDGs. To address the challenges of transforming agri-food systems through stronger engagements between research institutions, public actors and the private sector towards the achievement of the SDGs, in this paper we raise a number of critical questions and provide a number of recommendations that ground explicitly on seven short worldwide examples of research- public-private collaboration. In extreme synthesis, these recommendations for One CGIAR include: 1) Aiming at developing innovation ecosystems rather than value chains; 2) Focusing on entrepreneurial learning rather than on business training; 3) Governing rural incubators (or living labs) rather than governing partnerships.
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    Gender Report and template Forms for G+ Tools
    (Manual, 2021-02-01) Ashby, Jacqueline A.; Polar, Vivian
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