Accra, Ghana and Nairobi, Kenya
September 19, 2007
Building on revolutionary
approach piloted in South Africa, effort seen as critical to aid
long-term food security in Africa
The Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA) announced today that it is
partnering with the University of Ghana, Legon, to launch the
West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI), to train the
next generation of African crop scientists. AGRA will also
strengthen a programme piloted at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, the African Centre for Crop
Improvement (ACCI). Together, the two programmes will train
approximately 120 PhD plant breeders over the next ten years,
helping to create the critical mass of crop breeders needed to
end Africa’s food crisis.
“These programmes will bridge a wide gap in African scientific
capacity, by training African plant breeders in African
universities to improve and adapt the indigenous and orphan
crops needed to meet Africa’s food needs,” said Joseph DeVries,
Director of AGRA’s Programme for Africa’s Seed Systems.
With more than 200 million malnourished and hungry people in
Africa, the region is in dire need of highly trained crop
breeders who can develop high-yielding, hardy, and nutritious
varieties of African crops adapted to the wide range of
conditions and constraints faced by Africa’s small-scale
farmers. Such varieties are essential to farmers’ ability to
raise yields and incomes, and to end poverty.
The grant to the University of Ghana, Legon, is for US$4.9
million, and the grant to the University of KwaZulu-Natal is for
US$8.1 million. The Legon programme will recruit students from
western and central Africa, and the first class will enter in
January 2008. The South African program will recruit students
from eastern and southern Africa. Both grants will significantly
boost agricultural scientific capacity in their respective
institutions.
The WACCI and ACCI programmes set a new direction for
agricultural higher education in Africa. Until now, most PhD
training of African plant breeders has taken place in Europe or
the United States. That training has primarily involved crops
that are largely irrelevant to African farming.
“A PhD student training in Europe might look for valuable DNA
sequences in wheat. An African scientist whose country has no
wheat production and no DNA labs will not be equipped to face
the challenges of developing local food crops when they go
home,” said Prof. Eric Danquah, director of WACCI at the
University of Ghana, Legon.
Most of the crops important to Africa—such as cassava, sorghum,
millet, plantain, and cowpea—the so-called “orphan crops,” are
of little importance to researchers and educators in the
developed world. As a result, there is a serious shortage of
breeders of these crops. For example, there are under a dozen
millet breeders in all of Africa. Yet millions of people in
sub-Saharan Africa depend on millet as an important part of
their diet. Conversely, most of the more than US$35 billion
invested by private firms in agricultural research is
concentrated in North America and Europe, on a handful of
commercially important crops.
The new African university programmes will ensure relevance to
Africa’s food needs by recruiting students who already work as
scientists with African national research institutions and who
will return to those institutions upon completing their PhDs.
Furthermore, by training students in Africa rather than
requiring them to leave the continent, the programmes will help
to stem a “brain drain” of Africa’s agricultural scientists,
since significant numbers of Africans training in the U.S. and
Europe stay in their countries of training.
Both programmes will build scientific capacity in Africa for
African institutions. WACCI will offer a PhD fellowship which
includes two years of coursework and three years of field
research. Current crop science programmes in Africa are solely
research-based, lacking the critical course work offered in the
US and Europe.
First year course work will include plant genetics, crop
improvement, biometry, quantitative genetics, molecular genetics
and biotechnology in plant breeding, plant microbial
interactions and disease control and plant stress physiology.
To help update and strengthen the curriculum, Cornell University
in New York is also joining the partnership, and will receive a
grant of US$1.7 million to provide services and resources. These
include assisting with curriculum design, assessing research
capacity, and reviewing dissertation proposals. Cornell will
also provide distance learning opportunities and help in the
design of information technology infrastructure. And the
university’s Mann Library will facilitate access to world-class
agricultural library resources and services for WACCI and ACCI
PhD students.
Building on Success
WACCI will build on the success of ACCI. Having started in 2000
as a mere concept—with no staff, students or offices—the
programme graduated its first class of African PhD plant
breeders last spring. It is currently training eight new PhD
students each year, and has 46 students in the system, tackling
13 crops. Together with their local co-supervisors, the students
already form a de facto network of plant breeders.
"We are training applied plant breeders with a broad set of
skills so that they can succeed in breeding better crop
varieties, however challenging their home environment," said
Prof. Mark Laing, Director of the ACCI at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal. "By focussing our students' Ph.D. thesis research
on local crops, in local environments, the programme will use
the power of applied plant breeding on African crops, aiming to
develop effective solutions to long-standing problems facing
Africa's farmers."
The programme, which draws students from 13 countries, has
already had a positive national impact on plant breeding in
Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda, said AGRA’s DeVries. One PhD student
has shown that it can take as little as three years to develop
superior cassava varieties with resistance to an aggressive
virus. In the past, plant breeders have taken 6 to 8 years to
make similar progress, according to DeVries.
Ultimately, AGRA envisions plant breeding stations located in
every agriculturally important biogeographic zone, populated
with skilled, knowledgeable plant breeders, working on locally
important crops to meet local needs.
The African-led Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
(AGRA) is a dynamic partnership working across the continent to
help millions of small-scale farmers and their families lift
themselves out of poverty and hunger. AGRA programs develop
practical solutions to significantly boost farm productivity and
incomes while safeguarding the environment and biodiversity. To
achieve this goal, Alliance partnerships address all key aspects
of African agriculture: from seeds, soil health and water to
markets, agricultural education and policy. AGRA is chaired by
Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations.
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