Finger millet is a climate resilient crop that is of great importance for food and nutritional security. The Genetic Resources Research Institute (GeRRI), Kenya holds a finger millet collection of over 2000 accessions. In order to ensure this collection plays a greater role in enhancing food security, GeRRI has developed partnerships with different categories of germplasm users, particularly farmers.

This partnership is aimed at using GeRRI’s collection to enhance the varietal options available to farmers for fighting climate change. The farmers have been accorded an opportunity to select their preferred ecotypes based on their own selection criteria.

This subset comprises of 23 accessions that were selected by farmers in Homa Bay, Western Kenya through participatory variety selection. It was selected from a pool of 630 accessions, with 43 farmers participating in the selection process. The key selection criteria was time to maturity, number and size of fingers, extent of bird damage and drought tolerance.