Power of Diversity Funding Facility

The Power of Diversity Funding Facility is a multi-donor initiative managed by the Crop Trust, dedicated to conserving, cultivating and promoting the consumption of relatively neglected opportunity crops across Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean. These crops have immense, but largely underrealized, potential to diversify global food systems, enhance food and nutritional security, and strengthen climate resilience.

What Are Opportunity Crops?

Opportunity crops are nutritious and resilient species traditionally grown by smallholder farmers, often in marginal areas. They are naturally adapted to challenging environments and require fewer inputs, while offering significant nutritional benefits. However, they remain underutilized due to a lack of research, policy support and market access. From jackfruit to fonio and miracle berry, dive into our Opportunity Crops Knowledge Base to learn more.

Key Goals and Objectives

• Unlock the potential of opportunity crops to contribute to resilient, equitable and sustainable pathways for global food security.
• Integrate opportunity crops into sustainable food systems through conservation, production and market development efforts.
• Address systemic barriers to opportunity crops, including chronic underinvestment, limited research and weak value chains.

Activities

The Power of Diversity Funding Facility will support activities in three main areas:

• Securing opportunity crop diversity in genebanks. This activity includes safety duplication of seeds and characterization of traits, making sure that these crops are useful to breeders, researchers and farmers.
• Strengthening opportunity crop value chains by addressing key barriers and creating favorable conditions for production and consumption. This includes actively engaging farmers and consumers to evaluate crops, carrying out nutritional characterization and enhancing seed systems.
• Sharing knowledge and integrating scientific evidence into policy-making and global knowledge systems. This includes partnership building, policy advocacy, and data sharing to strengthen decision-making and promote opportunity crops.

Funding and Implementation

The Power of Diversity Funding Facility launched with the following initial funding from key donors.

• EUR 10 million from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through KfW Development Bank.
• EUR 2 million from the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Ireland.

At first, the the Power of Diversity will focus on 14 priority opportunity crops across seven countries - Colombia, Kenya, India, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Additional funding can extend the project’s reach to more countries, driving a shift towards resilient and sustainable agrifood systems worldwide.

The Power of Diversity builds on Crop Trust work on opportunity crops through the BOLD project’s BOLDER initiative supported by the Government of Norway and will collaborate with the World Vegetable Center’s initiative ‘Vegetables4Life’ (2025–2035).