Research Initiative: Improving cassava yield in Africa's drought-prone environments
Product Delivery Coordinator: Emmanuel Okogbenin

Feature story:

The cassava Challenge Initiative was officially launched in July 2010 at a workshop held in Accra, Ghana.

Cassava Research Initiative Launch

• Feature story on the launch
• "Country perspectives on cassava in Africa" story

Current projects in this RI:

Please click on the links below to view the corresponding Executive summary

• G3007.03: Development of genomics resources for molecular breeding of drought tolerance in cassava (PI: Pablo Rabinowicz, UoM)
• G4008.26: A cassava breeding community of practice in Africa for accelerated production and dissemination of farmer-preferred cassava varieties resistant to pests and diseases (PI: Emmanuel Okogbenin, NRCRI)
• G7010.01.01: Improvement and evaluation of the existing cassava reference set for Africa (Development of a genetic resources base for drought and biotic stress improvement in cassava (PI: Morag Ferguson, IITA)
• G7010.01.02: Improving and deploying markers for biotic traits (PI: Chiedozie Egesi, NRCRI)
• G7010.01.03: Implement MARS projects for drought tolerance (PI: Emmanuel Okogbenin, NRCRI)
• G7010.01.04: Phenotyping cassava for drought tolerance to identify QTLs (PI: Alfredo Alves, Embrapa)
• G7010.01.05: A cassava breeding community of practice in Africa for accelerated production and dissemination of farmer-preferred cassava varieties resistant to pests and diseases (PI: Emmanuel Okogbenin, NRCRI)

Events
Forthcoming events: TBC

Past events

• Cassava CI Launch workshop, 23–24 July, Accra, Ghana
• Workshop materials

Please note that this page is currently under construction, with more information to be posted soon.

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Improving cassava yield in Africa's drought-prone environments

Target countries: Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania (and Uganda via the GCP-supported cassava breeders community of practice)

Lead institute: National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI), Umudike, Nigeria

This project expands on earlier work to map genes responsible for cassava mosaic disease (CMD) resistance by identifying additional sources for resistance to CMD, as well as to other biotic stresses. It also incorporates an ongoing cassava breeders’ community of practice  (CoP) that focuses on the application of molecular breeding for variety development. This effort is spearheaded by NRCRI in collaboration with other country programmes in Africa.

The project also focuses on drought tolerance. Borrowing from the development of a new marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) approach for other crops, MARS for cassava will be implemented in Nigeria and Ghana.


The cassava Research Initiative made a good start in 2010. The official launch was in July 2010 but activities had already begun in earnest at the beginning of the year. The main focus of the activities was setting up crosses to develop the populations that will be used for mapping resistance to biotic traits, and for marker-assisted recurrent selection for drought tolerance. One drawback was that a drought evaluation field experiment conducted in Brazil and Colombia was compromised by heavy rain that resulted in flooding of the Colombia site.

Main achievements in 2010

• The launch meeting in Accra, Ghana, provided the opportunity to bring all partners together, and thus to ensure that project goals and activities are well understood and agreed to by all. A data management training workshop also took place at the time of the launch meeting.
• Crosses were made to map putative new sources of CMD resistance from two cassava genotypes (TMS97/2205 and TMS96/1089A), and to map new sources of cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) tolerance.
• Six cassava lines were identified as potential sources of drought tolerance and confirmed in field trials. Crosses were started to develop MARS populations.
• A disease-resistant cassava variety from previous GCP projects was released in Nigeria in December 2010. Salient details.