TL III, being implemented across seven African countries and one country in Asia, is the third phase of a 10-year vision for enhancing productivity of legumes in the drought-prone areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia through increasing availability and adoption of improved varieties and associated production packages.

1. Tropical Legumes - III (TL III)
E Monyo and RK Varshney
Improving livelihoods for smallholder farmers:
Enhanced grain legume productivity and
production in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia
Presented at the ICRISAT ESA
Regional In-house 26 - 27 April, 2016

2. TL III Focus Geographies and Crops

3. Position of TL in the BMGF Grant potfolio
– The largest legume grant in the
Foundation’s grant system
– Is one of few selected BMGF Sentinel
Grants identified to provide learning to the
BMGF overall Agric. Dev. investment
– TL III (the 3rd phase of the project now in
its 8th year) officially started in April 2015

4. TLIII OUTCOMES
• Women’s production capacities enhanced and gender yield
gap in legume systems closed by 20%
• ICRISAT groundnut and chickpea, CIAT common beans and IITA
cowpea have shown significant improvements in effectiveness
• Realized productivity and production gains (20 – 50%) for
groundnut, chickpea, cowpea and common bean over
improved and local varieties in focus geographies
• Delivery partners are producing and disseminating quality
seeds of improved varieties of all 4 legumes in sufficient
quantities to cover 20% of the area cropped with over half the
beneficiary SHF being women

5. Management W/plan activities
and achievements for 2015
• Implementing a multi-stakeholder project launch
workshop
• Implementing National Annual Planning meetings
• Curation and dissemination of TL-III Data as global
public goods
• Communicating TL-III project progress, achievements
and impact
• Supporting breeding pipelines for groundnuts,
cowpea, common bean, and chickpea in target TL-III
countries
• Management and reporting of Project achievements

6. TL III Theory of Change

7. Challenges, Constraints, Risks &
Mitigations
• It has taken long to fill the project positions – hence
the project is off to a slow start (The gender scientist
has not joined to-date and gender related research
activities are behind schedule)
• Ongoing security and instability in parts of Mali and
Nigeria
• Drought in Ethiopia (ElNino effect of 2015) .

8. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
THANKS