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Received: 22 June 2017

Accepted: 20 September 2018

First Online: 7 November 2018

Authors’ information

: Aloyce R Kaliba is a Professor of Economics and Statistics in the College of Business at Southern University and A&M College. He graduated from Kansas State University, Manhattan, USA, with a MSc and PhD in 1986 and 2000, respectively. He specialized in Agricultural Economics with a special interest in International Development and Policy Analysis. Between 1984 and 1997, he worked with the Ministry of Agriculture in Tanzania as an extension agent and an Agricultural Economist before joining the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff as a Policy Analyst in 2001 and Southern University as an Associate Professor in 2007. Apart from teaching, he is also a Co-Director of the University Center for Entrepreneurial an Economic Development. His mission includes strengthening research capacity and management in developing countries and establishing collaborative research and extension activities between US and African researchers.Kizito Mazvimavi has a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He is an agricultural economics expert with over 25 years of experience as a researcher, monitoring and evaluation specialist, and project manager. He has undertaken work for Different Development Agencies both as a development specialist and managing impact assessments of agricultural relief and market interventions. As a Country Representative for ICRISAT in Zimbabwe and Impact Assessment Specialist for Eastern and Southern Africa, he is currently a principal investigator for various impact assessment studies and supervising the implementing various agricultural research projects.Theresia L Gregory is an Agricultural Economist at Selian Agricultural Research Institute (SARI), Arusha, Tanzania. The institute mandates include conducting crop research in northern Tanzania. She is the Lead Scientists in Economic Evaluation and impact assessment of new agricultural innovations introduced in the region.Fridah M Mgonja is a Principal Agricultural Research Officer within the Crops Research Program at Selian Agricultural Research Institute (SARI). She is a lead scientist in participatory variety selection, which provides a wide choice of varieties to farmers to evaluate in their own environment using their own resources for increasing production. She is also a coordinator of the Harnessing Opportunities for Productivity Enhancement (HOPE) project that focuses on developing improved varieties and crop management practices to increase productivity under harsh, dry production environments in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.Mary Mgonja is a plant breeder, who works as the director for technology and communication at Namburi Agricultural Company Limited, a private Tanzanian agricultural enterprise. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy in plant breeding, and plant genetics, jointly obtained from the University of Ibadan and from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, also located in Ibadan. Before joining Namburi, she was a country director of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). She has served as principal scientist on the improvement of dryland cereals at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics and a Tanzania representative in the crop networks in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and in the East African Community (EAC).

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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