The success of crop genetic improvement strategies rely on the private sector as an effective vehicle for delivery. While the average area-weighted age of maize varieties continues to decrease in sub-Saharan Africa, many old varieties still dominate the market. Seed systems remain a bottleneck in genetic improvement strategies. I lead a team trying to deploy a seed production technology in sub-Saharan Africa which would reduce the complexity of hybrid maize seed production. We are currently quantifying the benefits of this technology to both seed companies and farmers.

This research is part of Bill & Melinda Gates funded SPTA project.

Farmers are increasingly involved in the final stage of testing within crop breeding pipelines to validate new varieties within the context of their own realities. Smallholder farmers are highly diverse in terms of resource endowments and access, preferences, aspirations, and constraints, even within a community. It is important that host farmers adequately represent social heterogeneity of smallholders within target population of environments (TPE) to ensure that crop breeding is responsive to diverse farmers’ needs.

My research, in collaboration with maize breeders and socio-economics colleagues, focuses on ensuring improving gender intentionality within maize breeding pipelines through developing sampling methods to identify host farmers and ensuring new technologies are tested with a wide range of target beneficiaries with specific focus on resource-poor and women farmers.

This research is part of the Bill & Melinda Gates funded projects AGG, SPTA, FarmSelect and 1000Farms.

Climate change and related weather events indirectly increase child malnutrition by increase food insecurity and decreasing dietary diversity. I am working with a multi-disciplinary team to to generate evidence linking climate change to malnutrition, we aim to co-develop mitigation strategies with communities that directly address the link between climate change and malnutrition.

This research is funded by the Wellcome Trust, led by Zvitambo Child and Maternal Health Institute in collaboration with the Food and Nutrition Council and Cornell University.