IITA Cassava Builds Digital Breeding Capacity Through EBS Train-the-Trainer Program

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IITA Cassava Builds Digital Breeding Capacity Through EBS Train-the-Trainer Program

By: Ruth Carpio

24 September, 2026

Building on the EBS Train-the-Trainer program for the IITA Yam team in May 2026, the Enterprise Breeding System (EBS) continued its capacity-building efforts with IITA Cassava. The Yam program highlighted the

training approach that GUS uses to build local EBS expertise and help teams adopt and maintain EBS workflows.

Virtual Training for IITA Cassava

During the third and fourth weeks of August 2026, the IITA Cassava team participated in a virtual EBS Train-the-Trainer program facilitated by GUS teams from Asia and Africa.

An important aspect of the initiative is that the IITA EBS instance is a multi-crop instance supporting breeding activities for different IITA crop programs. The training thus focused not only on individual EBS tools but also on how connected workflows can support breeding operations across crop programs.

Connecting the Breeding Workflow

Through demonstrations, hands-on exercises, and practical activities, participants learned about the EBS workflow from experiment creation and trial design to inventory and planting preparation, field data collection, quality control, analytics, and genotyping services.

The training also included how Field Book integrates with EBS, allowing field teams to collect and sync data back to the system, and tools to visualize phenotypic data, check quality, and request analysis.

Building Local EBS Capacity

As a Train-the-Trainer initiative, the program aimed to build internal capacity within IITA Cassava; not only to teach participants how to use EBS, but to enable them to apply, support, and share EBS knowledge within their teams.

Through hands-on exercises, participants worked through the full breeding workflow, applying different EBS tools and seeing how they connect across breeding activities. The final practical activity brought together multiple steps of the workflow, reinforcing how the tools work together in practice.

The program builds on the approach used by Global User Support (GUS) to develop local EBS expertise and sustainable support capacity within adopting institutes. This helps teams manage EBS workflows and provide support within their own breeding programs.

With both IITA’s Yam and Cassava teams participating in EBS Train-the-Trainer programs, EBS continues to support IITA in strengthening the use and support of integrated breeding workflows across its multi-crop programs.