About EiB

Initially an official CGIAR Platform, EiB is now a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded project that helps deliver the new CGIAR Genetic Innovation Initiatives. EiB work is now distributed among:

Along with:

As CGIAR and national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) modernize crop breeding programs, Excellence in Breeding has worked to coordinate and support breeding teams to improve strategies, technologies and practices. Tasked by the funder coalition Crops to End Hunger, EiB supports consistent and rapid progress toward six requests from Funders (download PDF), and monitoring of progress.

EiB supports breeding programs to accelerate genetic gains and deliver faster varietal turnover through system-level coordination and holistic partnerships. As part of these relationships, EiB draws from innovations in the public and private sector to provide access to: 

  • Cross center, system level coordination
  • Program assessment
  • Breeding strategies to understand and meet market demands
  • Advice, consulting and mentoring
  • Training
  • Tools and technologies
  • Shared support services
  • Small grants and resources
  • Best practices
  • Private and public sector partnerships
  • Coalition building and information sharing

Starting from a standard measure of breeding program excellence, members of the platform are supported to improve and optimize their breeding schemes through the incorporation of product design, genotyping and sequencing, phenotyping, and bioinformatics tools and services. The knowledge accumulated by EiB's five interlinked Modules is shared among partners, and publicly through an online Toolbox.

For legacy EiB information related to the official CGIAR Platform (2027-2021), please visit:

EiB's five interlinked modules, covered market-oriented product design, program optimization, phenotyping, genotyping, data management and more: