The CGIAR Trust Fund provides for two types of pooled funding for programming carried out by the CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) and Platforms: Funding Windows 1 and 2 (W1/2), in addition to W3 funding. An explanation of these funding types can be found in the CGIAR Financial Report for 2018.
W1/2 funding is used by the CRPs to take advantage of opportunities to accelerate research or pathways to scale and impact. The range of actual activities funded by W1/2 during 2018 included developing and piloting innovations; gender and youth integration; capacity building; communication; innovative research and data generation; ex-ante and ex-post impact assessments; enhancing partnerships and collaboration; and policy engagement.
CRPs split their W1/2 funding between cross-cutting support at the CRP level and funding for their flagships. Platforms are almost entirely funded through W1/2; as such, they use the funds to cover the critical recurring costs of maintaining the functions of genebanks, breeding and data management, as well as opportunities for innovation.
W1/2 funding was valuable for strategic investments along the whole impact pathway, from upstream research to downstream development of business models and multi-stakeholder partnerships for innovation and scaling out. LIVESTOCK shifted percentages of their funding from generating new data to developing strategies, tools and business plans to achieve impact, demonstrating a shift in priorities as a CRP becomes more mature (LIVESTOCK, 2018).
Table 15 provides a list of examples of W1/2 use reported in 2018.
A full list of internal CGIAR collaborations across CRPs and Platforms can be found in Annex 7.
Cross-CGIAR collaboration contributes to the release of a biofortified zinc maize hybrid
MAIZE 2018 annual report
After many years of breeding research, Guatemala’s first biofortified zinc maize hybrid, ICTA HB-18, was released in May 2018 as part of efforts to improve food and nutrition security in a country where over 46% of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition.
More than 40% of Guatemala’s rural population were found to be deficient in zinc, an essential micronutrient that plays a crucial role in pre-natal and post-natal development, and is key to maintaining a healthy immune system.
It was developed by CIMMYT, MAIZE, A4NH and Guatemala’s Institute for Agricultural Science and Technology, with support from HarvestPlus. Commercialized by the private sector company Semilla Nueva, the biofortified zinc maize hybrid contains 6-12ppm more zinc and 2.5 times more quality protein compared to conventional maize varieties.
Source: MAIZE, AR 2018.
Improving Efficiency
Highlights of efficiency improvements in 2018 included:
- Taking advantage of the EiB platform for AFS breeding programs. This involved sharing protocols (for example, barcoding and sampling), service providers (molecular markers, bioinformatics), sequencing and High Throughput Phenotyping facilities.
- Connecting AFS CRP and Center breeding programs with the CtEH initiative and the product line approach towards more demand-driven variety delivery.
- Connecting all the CRPs’ and Platforms’ annual results in a common management information system from the Managing Agricultural Research for Learning and Outcomes (MARLO) program and the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) platform through the CGIAR Level Agricultural Results Interoperable System Architecture (CLARISA), including a quality assurance process for these data which will be fed into a System-wide results dashboard in 2019.
READ MORE ON WORKING TOGETHER TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE
Photo by M. Ayene/WLE
