Institutionalizing Monitoring of Crop Variety Adoption using Genotyping (IMAGE) is a five-year program with the aim of establishing, institutionalizing, and scaling routine monitoring of improved variety adoption and turnover using genotyping.
It is led by country teams in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania, supported by Context Global Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Reliable 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.
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:
- Comparable estimates of varietal adoption and turnover will be generated and made available to stakeholders​
- Standardization of best-practices ​and supporting technologies​
- Establishment of ​sustainable business cases
- Pilot study results on varietal identity preservation in seed value chains for each country-crop combination ​
- Institutionalized system of ​varietal monitoring for long-term, sustainable national partner implementation
- Generated data used by seed sector stakeholders to make key decisions​
Environmental health and biodiversity 