The IMAGE Program™
The Institutionalizing Monitoring of Crop Variety Adoption using Genotyping program (IMAGE) is a six-year program led by country teams in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Ethiopia supported by Resourced and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with the aim of establishing, institutionalizing, and scaling routine monitoring of improved variety adoption and turnover using genotyping.
Relatable Monitoring
IMAGE will assess the varieties that farmers are growing of four staple crops within the three target countries and marking the rate of improved variety adoption through recurring surveys and comparative analysis.
Vision for Change
IMAGE supports inclusive agricultural transformation by providing insights and evidence for seed sector actors to enhance government agency capacity, improve stakeholder coordination, and lead to better resource allocation for varietal development and commercialization.
Program Goals
Enable a national leadership mandate to monitor crop varieties and adoption.
Build a network of technical experts and service providers to provide personalized advisory support.
Establish best practices that enable routine monitoring and produce credible results.
Form a sustainable funding mechanism based on use cases with government and stakeholder buy-in.
Advocate for institutional capacity for reliable monitoring programs.
Staple Crops Selected By Country
Genotyping to Assess Varietal Adoption and Turnover
IMAGE provides the opportunity to leverage past monitoring pilots and for cross-country learnings while advancing genetic reference libraries, establishing protocol adoption, and building towards institutionalization over five years. This is done through six objectives:
1
Comparable estimates of varietal adoption and turnover will be generated and made available to stakeholders
2
Standardization of best-practices and supporting technologies
3
Establishment of sustainable business cases
4
Pilot study results on varietal identity preservation in seed value chains for each country-crop combination
5
Institutionalized system of varietal monitoring for long-term, sustainable national partner implementation
6
Generated data used by seed sector stakeholders to make key decisions
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