CIMMYT Receives 2025 Al-Sumait Prize for African Development, Recognizing Decades of Science for Food Security

The prestigious award honors CIMMYT’s contributions to agricultural resilience and climate-smart crop solutions across Africa, benefiting 9.2 million households

TEXCOCO, MEXICO, May 12, 2026 /⁨EINPresswire.com⁩/ – The Kuwait Fund for the Advancement of Sciences has named CIMMYT as the recipient of the 2025 Al-Sumait Prize for African Development. The prize, awarded in honor of the late humanitarian Dr. Abdurrahman Al-Sumait, recognizes organizations whose work has produced transformative, life-saving impact in Africa. This distinction celebrates CIMMYT’s decades of science-driven contributions to food security, agricultural resilience, and the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers across the continent.

CIMMYT has worked for more than five decades to turn scientific innovation into real-world humanitarian impact. Through the development and scaling of stress-tolerant crop varieties (including drought-tolerant maize and climate-resilient wheat) the organization has helped farming communities survive and recover from shocks such as droughts, floods, and pest outbreaks. In 2025 alone, CIMMYT supported tens of thousands of African farmers in planting climate-resilient crops to withstand the effects of El Niño, demonstrating the direct link between agricultural science and humanitarian response.

The Al-Sumait Prize recognizes CIMMYT’s reach across more than 20 African countries and its work alongside a broad network of national research systems, development partners, and farming communities. To date, CIMMYT’s climate-smart solutions have benefited more than 9.2 million households across Africa, improving food production, strengthening seed systems, and building the local capacity needed for long-term agricultural resilience.

“This prize belongs to the hundreds of CIMMYT scientists, staff, farmers, and partners who have dedicated their work to building food security in Africa,” said Dr. Bram Govaerts, Director General of CIMMYT. “We are deeply grateful to the Kuwait Fund for the Advancement of Sciences and to the people of Kuwait for honoring this work and for sharing CIMMYT’s commitment to science for impact. This recognition strengthens our resolve to continue building long-term capacity for communities to not only survive crises, but to thrive beyond them”.

Science as a Foundation for Humanitarian Action

At the heart of CIMMYT’s work in Africa is a long-term vision of resilience: ensuring that communities have access to improved seeds, good rural livelihoods, healthy soils, and strong local seed systems that allow them to withstand shocks and recover faster. This approach complements emergency humanitarian action by building the productive capacity that reduces vulnerability in the first place.

The prize also reflects CIMMYT’s growing role as a partner to humanitarian and development organizations operating in fragile and food-insecure contexts. By working through local partners and national institutions, CIMMYT adds durable, science-based capacity to the broader humanitarian ecosystem; an approach increasingly recognized as essential to sustainable food security in Africa.

Honoring a Legacy of Service

The Al-Sumait Prize was established to honor the memory of Dr. Abdurrahman Al-Sumait, a Kuwaiti physician and humanitarian who dedicated his life to alleviating poverty, disease, and illiteracy in Africa. CIMMYT is proud to be counted among the organizations whose work reflects his legacy of service and science in the service of humanity.

The formal award ceremony will take place in Kuwait in December 2026.

About CIMMYT CIMMYT is a cutting-edge, non-profit, international organization dedicated to solving tomorrow’s problems today. It is entrusted with fostering improved quantity, quality, and dependability of production systems and basic cereals such as maize, wheat, triticale, sorghum, millets, and associated crops through applied agricultural science, particularly in the Global South, through building strong partnerships. This combination enhances the livelihood trajectories and resilience of millions of resource-poor farmers, while working towards a more productive, inclusive, and resilient agrifood system within planetary boundaries.

Nahyane Bakkali CIMMYT