Power of Diversity Funding Facilty

About the 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.

Presently, the Power of Diversity focuses on 13 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.

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 contributes to the transformative change of agrifood systems by leveraging the untapped potential and diversity of opportunity crops. To enable and sustain such change, the Funding Facility focuses on strengthening the conservation and use of opportunity crop diversity in close partnership with national genebanks, value chain actors, researchers and policymakers. Its implementation is structured around three interconnected pillars, which together reinforce and accelerate the transformation of agrifood systems. These pillars are:

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.

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).