This review of the literature on varietal change in sub-Saharan Africa looks in detail at adoption of new varieties of bananas in Uganda, cassava in Nigeria, potato in Kenya, sweetpotato in Uganda and yams in Côte d'Ivoire. The review explored three hypotheses about drivers of varietal change. There was a strong confirmation for the hypothesis that insufficient priority given to consumer-preferred traits by breeding programmes contributes to the limited uptake of modern varieties (MVs) and low varietal turnover. Lack of evidence meant the second hypothesis of insufficient attention to understanding and responding to gender differences in consumer preferences for quality and post-harvest traits was unresolved. The evidence on the third hypothesis about the informal seed system contributing to slow uptake of MVs was mixed. In some cases, the informal system has contributed to rapid uptake of MVs, but often it appears to be a barrier with inconsistent varietal naming a major challenge.

In the coming decades, feeding the expanded global population nutritiously and sustainably will require substantial improvements to the global food system worldwide. The main challenge will be how to produce more food with the same or fewer resources and waste less. Food security has four dimenespecially the case in Africa wheresions: food availability, food access, food use and quality, and food stability. Among several other food sources, the potato crop is one that can help match all these constraints worldwide due to its highly diverse distribution pattern, and its current cultivation and demand, particularly in developing countries with high levels of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. After an overview of the current situation of global hunger, food security, and agricultural growth, followed by a review of the importance of the potato in the current global food system and its role played as a food security crop, this paper analyses and discusses how potato research and innovation can contribute to sustainable agri-food systems comparing rural and industrial agri-food systems with reference to food security indicators. It concludes with a discussion about the challenges for sustainable potato cropping enhancement considering the needs to increase productivity in rural-based potato food systems that predominate in low-income countries, while promoting better resource management and optimization in industrial-based agri-food systems considering factors such as quality, diversity of products, health impacts, and climate change effects. Research and innovation options and policies that could facilitate the requirements of both rural and industrial potato-based agri-food systems are described.

Gender-responsive breeding is a new approach to making sure modern breeding takes advantage of opportunities to improve gender equality in agriculture. Conventional research on the acceptability of modern varieties has scarcely addressed gender differences during adoption studies. Gender-responsive breeding starts from a different premise that adoption and social impact will be enhanced if gender is addressed at early stages of variety design and priority setting in breeding. However, until recently, there was no concrete way to integrate gender considerations into the practice of breeding. This chapter draws lessons for the future from three RTB breeding programs innovating with gender-responsive breeding with a focus on piloting novel tools. The new G+ tools are designed to help gender researchers and breeders make joint, evidence-based decisions about the significance of gender differences for customer targeting and trait prioritization in variety development. Their piloting in the context of each program’s practice of gender-responsive breeding throws light on some valuable good practices that contributed to successful innovation.

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Crop breeding programs have often focused on the release of new varieties that target yield improvement to achieve food security and reduce poverty. While continued investments in this objective are justified, there is a need for breeding programs to be increasingly more demand-driven and responsive to the changing customer preferences and population dynamics. This paper analyses the responsiveness of global potato and sweetpotato breeding programs pursued by the International Potato Center (CIP) and its partners to three major development indicators: poverty, malnutrition and gender. The study followed a seed product market segmentation blueprint developed by the Excellence in Breeding platform (EiB) to identify, describe, and estimate the sizes of the market segments at subregional levels. We then estimated the potential poverty and nutrition impacts of investments in the respective market segments. Further, we employed the G+ tools involving multidisciplinary workshops to evaluate the gender-responsiveness of the breeding programs. Our analysis reveals that future investments in breeding programs will achieve greater impacts by developing varieties for market segments and pipelines that have more poor rural people, high stunting rates among children, anemia prevalence among women of reproductive age, and where there is high vitamin A deficiency. In addition, breeding strategies that reduce gender inequality and enhance appropriate change of gender roles (hence gender transformative) are also required.