HOPE II Progress Report

Abstract

HOPE II is a visionary project that seeks to improve the lives of smallholder farmers in the semi-arid tropics of Africa through enhanced dryland cereals productivity and production. It operates under five objectives: (1) Produce new, well-adapted sorghum, pearl millet, and finger millet cultivars with high yield potential and the genetic capacity to withstand major biotic and abiotic stresses; (2) Strengthen seed production and delivery systems for improved varieties; (3) Expedite the scaling out of new dryland cereals technologies (4) Quantifying uptake and adoption, gender, and impacts; and (5) Project oversight and results-based management to ensure accountability, learning and scalability. To succinctly cover an overview of the project’s progress on outputs without going into minor details of each activity, this report is organized into the following sections: (i) Developing Superior High Yielding Stress Tolerant Cultivars; (ii) Strengthening Seed Production and Delivery Systems for Improved Varieties; (iii) Promoting Best-Fit Cultivars and Allied Technologies to Enhance Awareness and Adoption; (iv) Gender Integration into Variety Development, Adoption and Impact; and (v) Strengthening Cereal Breeding Capacities of National Partners. These sections are described for each crop improvement program for each country with an introductory overview of ICRISAT’s backstopping activities and an overall project management section.