**3.4 Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT)**

TAAT was launched in 2018 and renewed in 2022 through awards from the African Development Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. IITA is the executing agency of TAAT [12]. It is an integral component of AfDB's Feed Africa Strategy [11] and was well represented at the Dakar 2 Summit. TAAT ensures agricultural sector growth, improving food security and encouraging inclusive growth by involving more women and youth in profitable agricultural production and processing. Its larger goal is to improve agriculture as a business across Africa by deploying productivityincreasing agricultural technologies within nine priority food commodities: maize, cassava, wheat, rice, sorghum and millet, orange-fleshed sweet potato, high iron beans, aquaculture, and small livestock [12, 74]. By focusing efforts on these value chains, TAAT impacts agricultural productivity and diversification, leading to improved food and nutrition security, job creation, and agro-industrialization. Other benefits are reduced vulnerabilities to market price fluctuations due to more reliable supplies leading to better organized and accessible markets, improved soil, land and water management practices, and increased resilience to climate variability and stress. TAAT's technologies are described through a series of Technology Toolkit Catalogs, including one devoted to modernized maize production [51].

TAAT's Maize Technology Delivery Compact is mainly active in the savanna agroecosystems of East and Southern Africa. TAAT delivered water-efficient maize to 5.6 million households in Eastern Africa, an area hit by severe droughts. In Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, a TAAT-led collaboration with 15 private-sector seed companies reached 600,000 farmers with 6000 MT of drought-tolerant maize varieties (see Section 2.1) treated with specialized dual-purpose pesticides with demonstrated capabilities to control Fall Armyworm (see Section 2.10). TAAT promotes seed treatment with Fortenza Duo (FD) to combat invasive Fall Armyworm (FAW). In Zambia and Zimbabwe, TAAT deployed 6598 metric tons of certified maize seed treated with Fortenza Duo through government programs and reached 660,000 beneficiaries. An internal report of an impact study commissioned by TAAT found a 1.5 MT/ha yield improvement among farmers who used the FD-treated seeds compared to those who did not.
