Deadline for Applications: 16 September 2026 by 11:59 pm CEST
Background and context
Across eleven genebanks, CGIAR Centers are custodians of the world's most diverse publicly available crop collections, comprising more than 700,000 accessions of more than 3,000 plant species. Under the terms of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA, hereafter ‘the Plant Treaty'), the genetic material housed in these CGIAR genebanks is freely available to researchers, breeders, local communities, and farmers; contributing to science and innovations for more resilient and sustainable food systems.
From 2025, CGIAR's work on genebanks has been organized under the Genebanks Accelerator. The Accelerator brings together CGIAR Centers and partners to strengthen the use of crop diversity through rigorous conservation, enabling policies, and world-class phytosanitary controls. By leveraging frontier technologies in genomics, artificial intelligence (AI),
and cryopreservation; the Accelerator aims to enhance the availability and impact of genetic resources worldwide.
For more than two decades, CGIAR has worked closely with the General Crop Diversity Trust (‘Crop Trust') alongside other funders to ensure the sufficient, sustainable, and predictable financing of genebanks consistent with Centers' obligations under the Plant Treaty. In practice, in addition to the funding from the Crop Trust to CGIAR Centers and any earmarked contributions through CGIAR Trust Fund Window 2 (W2) to the Genebanks Accelerator and its predecessors, CGIAR has used unearmarked CGIAR Trust Fund Window 1 (W1) contributions - allocated to the Genebanks Accelerator and its predecessors - to ensure that essential genebanks operations are funded at a ringfenced, minimum level.
Underpinning this approach is a series of careful costing reviews, aiming to ensure that funding towards CGIAR geneba