About PROSSIVA
Home > Who We Are
Program for Seed System Innovation for Vegetatively-propagated crops (VPCs) in Africa
PROSSIVA aims to enhance the efficiency, productivity, and profitability of VPC seed systems in target countries of Africa through conducting research and delivering innovations that will overcome seed system bottlenecks. PROSSIVA is implemented by Centers of the One CGIAR led by IITA, working in partnership with a diverse set of national and international partners operating in both the public and private sectors.The project will contribute to poverty alleviation, improved livelihoods, and new job opportunities, particularly for women and youth, by raising VPC productivity, increasing volumes of sale, and by improving the efficiency of seed marketing and delivery. The program complements the work of the Seed Equal Initiative of the One CGIAR, which aims to deliver increased rates of varietal turnover and greater seed volumes of focus crops.
Despite the importance of VPCs such as banana and plantain, cassava, sweetpotato and yam for food security in Africa, their seed systems are underdeveloped, thus making it difficult for producers to get disease-free planting materials of improved varieties in a reliable manner. The planting materials for these crops are also perishable, bulky, hard to transport, and susceptible to the transmission of diseases and pests. CGIAR centers and a wide diversity of public and private sector partners will conduct high quality and targeted research to deliver innovations that address these constraints and develop efficient and sustainable VPC seed systems in five implementing countries, namely: Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the program consolidates advancements from single-crop BMGF funded seed systems initiatives – YIIFSWA II, BASICS-II, SweetGAINS and RAPID-Banana. This integration facilitates cross learning between crops, capitalizing on the diverse set of cross-cutting opportunities, thus ensuring overall VPC seed systems development. An important feature of this project is that it was co-developed and is being co-implemented with seed systems experts and value chain actors who identified bottlenecks and prioritized target areas for innovation research to build functional seed systems in their respective target countries.