IITA and Bayer Launch Groundbreaking Research Collaboration to Transform African Agriculture
The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and Bayer today announced a comprehensive research collaboration agreement focused on accelerating agricultural innovation and building scientific capacity across sub-Saharan Africa.
- Science
IBADAN, Nigeria / ST. LOUIS, Missouri – 20 April 2026 – The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and Bayer today announced a comprehensive research collaboration agreement focused on accelerating agricultural innovation and building scientific capacity across sub-Saharan Africa. The partnership, which runs through 2028, will combine IITA’s globally recognized expertise in tropical crop improvement and smallholder farming systems with Bayer’s global breeding technologies to develop climate-resilient, high-yielding, nutrient-dense crop varieties tailored to smallholder farming systems.
The collaboration targets seven priority crops critical to African food systems and livelihoods—maize, soybean, cowpea, cassava, yam, banana and plantain, and Bambara groundnut—with the shared objective of delivering varieties that achieve a minimum 25% yield advantage in farmers’ fields. This ambitious goal directly supports critical Sustainable Development Goals including food security, poverty reduction, improved nutrition, and climate adaptation. It is also aligned with the Gates Foundation’s goal: Enabling hundreds of millions of people to break from poverty, putting more countries on the path to prosperity.”