50x2030 Supports SPIA Uganda Report 2025: Agricultural Diversity Under Stress

In March 2025, the CGIAR-Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA), the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) team, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), and the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) launched the SPIA Uganda Report 2025: Agricultural Diversity Under Stress. This report analyzes the impact of two decades of collaborative research between CGIAR-SPIA and NARO, which has resulted in innovations related to crops, livestock, and the management of natural resources in Uganda. The study builds on the Uganda Harmonized Integrated Survey (UHIS), a nationally representative panel survey implemented by UBOS with technical support from the World Bank LSMS team and FAO, and financed by the 50x2030 Initiative to Close the Agricultural Data Gap.

In the context of the first round of the UHIS in 2021/22, SPIA, in partnership with the LSMS team, integrated plant tissue collection for six major crops (maize, cassava, banana, beans, sweet potato, and groundnuts) into the data collection. This effort enabled DNA fingerprinting of crop samples from farmers’ fields on a national scale, providing access to improved varieties that originate from the NARO-CGIAR research partnership. Results show that household plots across Uganda are made up of mixtures of different genetic varieties, either through farmers’ deliberate decisions to mix seed or inadvertently through reliance on informal seed sources.

Read the report here.