Report of the virtual RTB ISC Annual Meeting 2021. The Grand Finale. July 7-9, 2021

OBJECTIVES • Progress by flagships shared with Independent Steering Committee (ISC) and RTB community • Reflection of RTB achievements and challenges • Contribute to the transition to One CGIAR with collective knowledge assets • Consolidate lessons learnt for implementation of new initiative

RTB Innovation Catalog - Method and Work Plan

This document describes the method for building RTB’s Innovation Catalog. We start by defining the objectives of this research, the problems and the challenges we are addressing. Most CGIAR innovations are documented in a way that does not favor their wider use. This has limited the contribution of CGIAR innovations to the developmental challenges that CGIAR investors demand. The goal of this research is to contribute to the CGIAR innovation management system that will enable the deployment of innovations faster, at a larger scale, and a reduced cost, having a more significant impact where they are needed the most. The purpose of the Innovation Catalog is to document RTB innovations, in a way that is easily accessible, and understandable. The Catalog will be user-friendly (see definition in Section 6.2). Technical terms, indicators, and categories will be standardized. The type of language and depth of information will be tailored to different types of users. The RTB Innovation Catalog will be developed using a tailor-made Scaling Readiness framework. Individual RTB innovations are the building blocks of the Innovation Catalog. Contextual information and connection to innovation packages will be documented for a few of the innovations

The Interplay of Perceived Risks and Benefits in Deciding to Become Vaccinated against COVID-19 While Pregnant or Breastfeeding: A Cross-Sectional Study in Italy

The present study examined the role of the perception of risks and benefits for the mother and her babies in deciding about the COVID-19 vaccination. In this cross-sectional study, five hypotheses were tested using data from a convenience sample of Italian pregnant and/or breastfeeding women (N = 1104, July–September 2021). A logistic regression model estimated the influence of the predictors on the reported behavior, and a beta regression model was used to evaluate which factors influenced the willingness to become vaccinated among unvaccinated women. The COVID-19 vaccination overall risks/benefits tradeoff was highly predictive of both behavior and intention. Ceteris paribus, an increase in the perception of risks for the baby weighed more against vaccination than a similar increase in the perception of risks for the mother. Additionally, pregnant women resulted in being less likely (or willing) to be vaccinated in their status than breastfeeding women, but they were equally accepting of vaccination if they were not pregnant. COVID-19 risk perception predicted intention to become vaccinated, but not behavior. In conclusion, the overall risks/benefits tradeoff is key in predicting vaccination behavior and intention, but the concerns for the baby weigh more than those for the mother in the decision, shedding light on this previously neglected aspect

A Review of Digital Data Resources on Innovation and Impact

The CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers, and Bananas (RTB) has commissioned a study to develop an innovation catalog to present its innovation portfolio to the international scientific and development community and to support ongoing efforts to establish an innovation management architecture in CGIAR. The study team has been tasked with designing an application model that can inform the innovation and impact management architecture of CGIAR and test it within the RTB innovation portfolio leading to an RTB Innovation Catalog that can be used as an example for future work. Guided by the recently finalized work methodology, the interdisciplinary research and technical team members have reviewed existing digital resources, i.e. web portals and databases that present the social innovations across multiple sectors such as agriculture, food, environment, health, and energy to the international research-for-development and impact investment communities. This document describes the methods and the findings of this review. It shows the profiles, features, and data provided by the digital resources; compares and contrasts them by assessing their relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, functionality, and formats. It shows that, although there are a few features that most existing digital resourcesshare, i.e. being hosted by international organizations, having easy to-navigate interfaces, and providing limited filtering and search options, there are significant differences between them. The digital resources focus on different subsets of innovation-related information and provide different levels of granularity. The review concludes that to present its innovations across the broad spectrum of digital resources, the RTB Program and CGIAR need to use rich metadata sets with a few different interface and export options to be customized based on the profile of individual, essential digital resources of interest

Descriptors for Documenting Innovations and their Contributions to Impact

The CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers, and Bananas (RTB) has been one of the leading CGIAR research programs in designing, developing, and using complexity-sensitive tools and practices that inform innovation management decisions in CGIAR. In addition to Scaling Readiness1 , which has been adopted by One CGIAR2 , several CGIAR centers3 , and CGIAR research programs4 , RTB has developed Scaling Fund5 as an instrument to nurture the innovations that have a significant potential for Scaling. RTB has also developed many other innovations that address innovation portfolio management, such as research impact forecasts6 and gender7 . Building on its experience in developing innovation management tools and practices, RTB has recently commissioned an interdisciplinary team, the RTB Catalog Team, to develop prototypes of a novel, systematic, innovation documentation framework and an online portal featuring key innovations generated by the program since 2015. The prototypes will be essential tools for establishing a new innovation management architecture that better serves the needs of One CGIAR by systematizing the existing CGIAR digital resources such as CLARISA, MEL, MARLO, and complementing them with an application tested using the diverse innovations in the RTB portfolio. In June 2021, two milestones were completed for developing the prototypes: the Methodology that describes the conceptual model and design principles and the Review of Digital Data Resources on Innovation and Impact. This document presents the third major milestone for developing the prototypes: Descriptors for Documenting Innovations and their Contributions to Impact. Following an introduction and description of the method, this paper presents the profiles and descriptions of each of the shortlisted innovation and impact-related descriptors, selected from a longer list of 255 identified by the RTB Innovation Catalog Team from 19 global digital resources

Data on how tree planting and management practices influence tree seedling survival in Kenya and Ethiopia

Understanding which trees farmers prefer, what determines their survival and enhancing farmer knowledge of tree management is key to increasing tree cover in agricultural landscapes. This article presents data on tree seedling survival under different tree planting and management practices in Kenya and Ethiopia. Data were collected from 1600 households across three Counties in Kenya and 173 households across four Woredas in Ethiopia, using a structured questionnaire which was administered through the Open Data Kit. Data on seedling survival were collected at least six months after tree seedlings were planted. To understand how planting and management practices influence tree planting across the different socioeconomic and biophysical contexts, both household level and individual tree level data were collected. Household level data included socio-economic and biophysical characteristics of the households while tree specific data included when the tree seedling was planted, where it was planted, the management practices employed and whether surviving. The datasets described in this article help understand which options confer the best chance survival for the planted seedlings and in which socio-economic and biophysical contexts they are most successful. [Abstract copyright: © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.

Increasing interoperability between food and agricultural systems: CGIAR and FAO collaboration

It is crucial that data resources can talk to each other through thesaurus, ontologies and standards. Therfore, the integration of CGIAR controlled vocabularynto the AGROVOC thesaurus is key to interlink our data sets and publications in the food and agricultural domain and produce multilingual quality labeling. The Task Group and a curation team defined the added value for the CGIAR to formally contribute to AGROVOC, and how to organize CGIAR contribution in a coherent workflow. The recommendations are the following: 1. One CGIAR needs to strengthen its contribution to AGROVOC thus supporting the consolidation of the semantic landscape for labeling data in agriculture and food systems. 2.CGIAR centers should wait a bit till the affiliation process is complete so that the appropriate unit that will be responsible for AGROVOC can consume the Agreement since the timeline for the affiliation process is just some few months away. 3.OneCGIAR data managers will have to sustain the collaboration and submit terms to populate the ONECGIAR concepts schema newly created to provide direct visibility of the set of concepts (https://agrovoc.fao.org/skosmosOneCGIAR/cgiar/en/ ). Based on the collaboration concrete results, The TG recommends that the term submission effort and collaboration with FAO continues with proper allocation of data managers’ time and a training plan. Contribution to AGROVOC should be part of the data managers ToRs to concrete provide recognition of this role