Significant progress was made in terms of beneficiaries reached with improved sweetpotato vines during this update period. More than 1 million direct and indirect beneficiaries were reached, with majority being in Tanzania and Uganda, countries where Farm Concern International has a large-scale dissemination and outreach program under its SeFaMaCo project. These countries accounted for more than one-half of the beneficiaries reached during this update period, with the SeFaMaCo project continuing to lead the rest of the sweetpotato projects in the SPHI platform in terms of number of households reached. Rwanda and Mozambique also showed strong progress in dissemination and ranked 3rd and 4th in terms of direct and indirect households reached. Cumulatively, more than 5.3 million households have been reached to date, representing 53% of the targeted 10 million households to be reached by 2020. This translates to a cumulative number of more than 25 million individual beneficiaries reached to date since 2009.
In terms of progress in the breeding and release of improved sweetpotato varieties, a total of 14 varieties were released by 4 countries namely, Ghana and Nigeria which are in the West Africa breeding platform, Uganda in the Eastern and Central Africa breeding platform and Malawi in the Southern Africa breeding platform. Among releases, seven were bred in-country while three (released in Malawi) were selected from seed generated by the CIP population development program in Uganda. Five of the released varieties were orange-fleshed; one was purple-fleshed; one was dark yellow-fleshed and seven were cream-fleshed. Six varieties were released from the West Africa platform, making it the leading in terms of variety releases during this update period.