Deep Institutional Capabilities

ICRISAT focuses on developing resilient crops and allied technologies for nutritious agri-food systems with reduced carbon footprints, along with scalable models for landscape restoration, integrated crop-livestock systems, and soil and water management.

We emphasize market-oriented delivery approaches, cutting-edge genomic science,Visio digital innovations, and promoting gender equity and youth engagement to enhance social inclusion.

Strategic Area 1: Enhance Crop Genetic Innovation

Our strategic focus on crop genetic innovation will center on enhancing pre-breeding and breeding capabilities, with an emphasis on building technical capacity at key local institutions such as NARS and universities.

By harnessing advanced genomic tools and techniques for rapid generation advancement, this strategic area aims to cultivate high-yielding, nutrient-rich, and stress-resilient cereal and legume varieties that are optimized for drought conditions, including bio-fortified and climate-adaptive varieties.

The vision will prioritize the development of dual-purpose crops that serve both food and livestock feed needs, and industry-oriented cultivars tailored to meet the varied demands of farmers and consumers, ensuring considerations of gender, age, and social inclusion are integrated into crop development processes.

Strategic Area 3: Develop Landscape Technologies and Integrated Agronomic Solutions

We will scale and integrate targeted plot and farm-level interventions up to the landscape level to optimize natural resource management. This will be achieved through the deployment of community-based watershed management, integrated soil fertility management practices and farm decision support tools that enhance soil nutrient and water use efficiency.

This strategic area incorporates the use of advanced geospatial technologies, including crop suitability maps and land use analysis derived from satellite imagery, to facilitate the adoption of climate-smart practices and improve carbon sequestration.

We will also utilize early warning systems for predicting extreme weather events or pest outbreaks, and implement scale-appropriate mechanization and digital innovations to enhance efficiency in agricultural and processing operations.

Strategic Area 5: Create Enabling Environments for Scaling and Impact

ICRISAT will strategically direct its research efforts to catalyze and facilitate the effective delivery of R4D investments, with a specific focus on conducting robust feasibility and foresight analysis to estimate return on investment of new innovations, technologies and processes as well as undertake ex-post impact studies and analyses to provide options for building climate-resilient agricultural value chains. This will include the identification of gaps and opportunities to forge strategic alliances with private sector and other value chain actors including farmers’ groups and youth to promote agripreneurship.

The approach will emphasize strengthening public-private partnerships, enhancing gender equity, and improving nutrition and health practices.  It will also aim to build capacity within extension systems and generate robust evidence to inform policies that bolster dryland agri-food systems worldwide.

Strategic Area 7: Integrate Tailored Corporate Support

This vision will be driven by a comprehensive corporate services framework, designed to seamlessly integrate resource mobilization, human resources, and communications to enhance operational efficiency and propel strategic initiatives.

We will strategically focus on diversifying funding streams and securing necessary resources to sustain and expand our projects.

Simultaneously, our human resources will focus on assembling a skilled workforce capable of executing our vision, while our communications team will actively promote our mission and achievements, engaging stakeholders through targeted outreach and impactful storytelling.