Center of Innovation for Crop Improvement for East and Southern Africa (CICI-ESA)

Cowpea improvement for yield, disease resistance, adaptation, and nutrition security

Cowpea, a legume that thrives in sandy soil, offers enormous nutritional, socio-economic and soil health benefits in the arid regions of East Africa. But the crop’s productivity struggles against drought, heat, low soil fertility and pests, putting pressure on food security in the region.

With a goal to develop more nutritious, resilient lines of cowpea, the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR), the Instituto de Investigação Agrária de Moçambique (IIAM) and the Tanzania Agriculture Research Institute (TARI-ILONGA) join to form the Center of Innovation for Crop Improvement for East and Southern Africa (CICI-ESA). By characterizing phenotypic and genomic diversity and conducting genome-wide association studies of cowpea germplasm, the Center of Innovation identifies traits that are farmer and consumer preferred and market demand driven.

The Center of Innovation prioritizes the inclusion of farmers in Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania in the process of designing and developing more productive and nutritious varieties while conducting a comprehensive analysis to understand specific gender and youth dynamics in the cowpea value chain. The release and use of stable high yielding, nutritionally rich, drought tolerant, disease resistant and early maturing varieties will increase productivity of the crop, and in doing so improve food security, reduce nutrition deficiencies and alleviate poverty, particularly amongst smallholder farmers, women and children.