This chapter discusses the status and challenges of agriculture in Africa and ways of transforming the agricultural sector into a modern, commercially oriented sector within the countries of Africa. It reviews the adoption of new plant varieties, where there has been ∼35% adoption of modern varieties in many food crops across sub-Saharan Africa over the past 15 years. The chapter also describes the advantages and disadvantages of the methods used to measure varietal adoption. Further, it identifies the key principles of demand-led variety design: how this differs from and complements other approaches; its relationship to innovation systems and value chains; the role of public policy and social dimensions; and the benefits and risks of implementing a demand-led breeding programme. The chapter also defines the role of the plant breeder and the rationale for breeders to adopt more demand-led variety design, including in the setting of breeding goals, consideration of trait trade-offs and measurement of progress. The aim of the chapter is to enable African plant breeders to understand the principles and share the best practices of demand-led variety design, and to act as a resource for education in this field. For this purpose, boxes are included in the main sections of the chapter that summarize its educational objectives and present the key messages and questions that are involved. There is also a final box at the end of the chapter that summarizes the overall learning objectives.

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