Projects funded under the Feed the Future Innovation lab for Legume Systems Research address five cross-cutting themes into their activities:

1. Gender
2. Human and Institutional Capacity Development
3. Youth
4. Nutrition
5. Resilience

To assist projects in identifying strategies and interventions to further incorporate these themes into their research, the lab established the Resilience Resource Team (RRT), the first of its kind for Feed the Future Innovation Labs.

The RRT is comprised of advisors in each of the cross-cutting areas plus monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and project management advisors. Beyond ensuring the integration of capacity development across cross-cutting themes, the purpose of this initiative is the design of a resilience framework to support the legume value chain.

This initiative first focused on the careful design and implementation of rubrics or scoring tools to assess readiness and capacity of the projects to address the cross-cutting themes and achieve the greatest impact. Results serve as baseline information on cross-cutting themes for these projects and capture of cross-cutting theme indicators. These also informed outreach and education initiatives and follow up consultations of RRT with the Legume Systems Research project teams. Gap areas resulted in design of call for concept notes, and additional technical assistance and capacity grants from the Legume Systems Research Management Entity to ongoing projects to support their efforts in these cross-cutting areas.

A dynamic M&E dashboard has been created to capture data and information on RRT performance and cross-cutting theme milestones.

To learn more about the Legume Systems Innovation Lab visit our website