What is Enable, the new coordination engine supporting CGIAR crop breeding?

By Biswanath Das, Enable Area of Work Lead, CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow

ENABLE is the coordination and support engine of CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow (B4T) — a cross-functional Area of Work that connects people, processes, and priorities across CGIAR crop improvement networks. We work behind the scenes so that breeding pipelines — national and regional — run more smoothly, partnerships deliver more value, and investments have a measurable impact.

Our five high level objectives are to:

• Strengthen partnerships with NARES, SMEs, and universities by ensuring co-creation, co-delivery and co-ownership; 
• Coordinate capacity development across Breeding for Tomorrow’s Areas of Work; 
• Ensure robust key performance indicators are deployed and reported against; 
• Assess and communicate impact across Breeding for Tomorrow; 
• Support fair and effective germplasm exchange. 

A fresh approach to partnership 

Across the product definition–development–delivery continuum, ENABLE boosts the efficiency, effectiveness, and inclusivity of CGIAR and partners’ breeding efforts. It works to: 

• Design smart coordination mechanisms to reduce fragmentation and duplication; 
• Lower transaction costs for partners and funders;  
• Improve internal and external communications on activities, opportunities, challenges, strategies, performance, and impact; 
• Promote innovation in the design, development, and delivery of new products.

By integrating outcomes from all Breeding for Tomorrow’s Areas of Work, Enable makes breeding processes more inclusive, equitable, and transparent – not just successful within individual silos, but impactful across the whole system. 

Augmenting partners’ roles and responsibilities in breeding and delivery

Enable facilitates partnership and ownership by augmenting partner roles in regional breeding and delivery networks based on partner interests and comparative advantage.  

Foundational to support sustainable partnerships is the adoption of transparent and fair ways of working, outlined in breeding network membership agreements. These agreements, spearheaded by the RTB breeding networks in Africa during Genetic Innovation (2022-2024), establish a governance framework that ensures CGIAR, NARES, SMEs, and university partners have access to germplasm and knowledge, while committing to shared standards and practices that harmonize approaches and reduce duplication. 

The ENABLE approach to regional crop network optimization: 

• Provides networks with governance frameworks, planning tools, and change management support. 
• Empowers and technically backstops partners to assume network roles, particularly where capacity gaps exist. 
• Ensures partners are adequately supported to fulfil their network roles and responsibilities through transparent and data-driven costing. 
• Aims to embeds good partnership practices co-developed with global alliances like GFAIR, document successful models from across CGIAR–NARES networks,  
• Supports the networks to ensure that policies, regulations, rules, procedures, and practices required for the efficient, effective, and equitable sharing of genetic resources for food and agriculture are in place and functioning.

Progress isn’t left to chance: we track it through annual partnership surveys, key performance indicators, and regular self-assessment, creating a feedback loop that keeps networks improving and funders confident. 

Coordinating capacity development

Enable connects the dots and avoids fragmented approaches to capacity development. By engaging with CGIAR breeding teams and national partners on the ground, we gather insights on what’s needed across the breeding and delivery continuum, whether it’s support in market intelligence, breeding operations, data tools, or seed delivery. The identification of capacity development priorities begins with a standardized program baseline assessment designed to identify critical gaps and lead to the development of a customized but holistic improvement plan for key network partners.  

This is followed by targeted training (e.g. definition of breeding targets in a standard target product profile template) and investment (e.g. investment in adoption of digitization software and tools). Human and infrastructural capacity development is often coordinated by CGIAR experts or in stances where expertise is lacking in the CGIAR, by third-party subject matter experts identified from a trusted network of training partners and industry leaders.  

This capacity development model has been successfully operated for a number of years with critical support from various initiatives such as Excellence in Breeding (EiB) for technical backstopping and Crops to End Hunger (CtEH) that made targeted and highly impactful equipment and infrastructural investments in key breeding and delivery networks in Sub Saharan Africa.  

Assessing the impact of Breeding for Tomorrow’s work

Funders and partners need clear evidence of return on investment. ENABLE delivers it. 

We coordinate impact assessment of B4T AOW using a variety of methodologies to ensure B4T is delivering against CGIAR impact areas, partner and funder priorities. A cross-institutional community of practice is developing scalable and efficient methods to assess impact, effectiveness and cost-efficiency of Breeding for Tomorrow’s interventions.  

Findings will be widely shared, informing strategic decisions, strengthening market intelligence use, and justifying future investments. 

In a nutshell

ENABLE works hand in hand with all Breeding for Tomorrow Areas of Work and collaborates with other Science Programs and Accelerators, such as – Sustainable Animal and Aquatic Foods and Sustainable Farming, Gender Equality and Inclusion, Data Transformation, and Capacity Sharing – to build the essential architecture for innovation management. 

The bottom line: ENABLE exists to make sure partnerships thrive, capacity grows, and CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow’s results speak for themselves.

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Main image: Dr Abebe Menkir (right), maize breeder and fall armyworm specialist with IITA and MAIZE, speaks with Bello Abu Bakkar (left) maize farmer and president of the Nigerian Maize Association. Photo by C. de Bode/CGIAR. Written with Julie Puech. This work contributes to CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow (B4T) Science Program through its Enable Area of Work.