Traditionally, sweetpotato breeding programs have taken a long time, 7 to 8 years, to produce a new variety. Moreover, as of 2008, most countries in Africa had no real breeding program and relied on testing materials developed elsewhere. This flyer explains the progress in breeding work between 2015 and 2016. Highlights are: By July 2016, activities at CIP-Headquarters in Peru to exploit heterosis through reciprocal recurrent selection (RRS) or cyclic selection were ahead of schedule. In Uganda, results on the potential to exploit heterosis confirm selecting strongly for virus resistance using RRS and in Mozambique seven new drought-tolerant cultivars were released in February 2016.