**1. Introduction**

Africa is the region with the highest prevalence of hunger and malnourishment. The persistent challenge of insufficient food, unbalanced nutrition, and deteriorating natural resources in the most vulnerable nations, characterized by fast population growth, calls for utilization of innovative technologies to curb constraints of crop production. Major revitalization of agricultural research in Africa is needed to underpin necessary increases in sustainable productivity in anticipation of the increase in population and changes in climate. Since many of the clonally propagated crops grown in Africa, such as cassava, yams, bananas, and plantains, and seed crops, such as cowpea, tef, sorghum, and millet, are not commonly consumed as food outside of the region, researchers in Africa have the responsibility to devise innovative breeding strategies for these crops. African agriculture is characterized by subsistence farming by smallholder farmers growing various locally adapted crops, many of which are considered understudied or "orphan" crops. These crops are vital for providing nutrition and income to resource-poor farmers, particularly in the face of confounding climatic and soil constraints. A regular supply of high-yielding nutritional varieties that respond to the changing biotic and abiotic stress environment is required. Conventional plant breeding has contributed tremendously to increased crop yields; however, the rate of genetic gain over the past few decades has been relatively slow for a number of reasons, including the lengthy breeding cycle, a characteristic of many clonally propagated crops [1]. Enhancing genetic gain entails a multifaceted approach of combining conventional and new technological advances [2,3].

The Consortium of International Agricultural Research, abbreviated as CGIAR, in collabora‐ tion with partners, is spearheading agricultural biotechnology research in Africa [4]. Several consortium research programs (CRP) are performing collaborative research on more than a dozen staple food crops of developing countries, including vegetatively propagated root, tuber, and banana (RTB), about seven grain legumes, and four dryland cereals. These crops support the livelihood of hundreds of millions of resource-limited farmers and traders in developing nations. The vegetatively propagated RTB crops (cassava, yam, potato, sweet potato, banana, and plantain) share many breeding challenges, including pathogen transmis‐ sion from one generation to the next, polyploidy, low fertility and multiplication rates, and long breeding cycles. These can best be addressed by exploiting synergies across crops and technologies to increase genetic gain per unit time. Furthermore, the attainable yield potential of extensively studied crops such as rice, maize, wheat, and soybean are considerably lower in developing countries owing to unique production constraints in Africa calling for unique intervention, including genomics. Declining costs of DNA sequencing have triggered a surge in research on crops of local or regional importance and, with time, should translate into increased yields and yield stability, thus reducing the reliance on a smaller number of major crops [2,5–7].

This chapter initially outlines current and prospective genomic resources pertaining to Africa's staple crops, and then discusses how genomics strategies in the era of high-throughput nextgeneration sequencing technologies are being applied to increase genetic gain in developing countries with insights from CGIAR in general, and IITA in particular.
