The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has announced 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.
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.
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.
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.
Prof. Mark Laing, Director of the ACCI at the University of KwaZulu-Natal said, "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.
AGRA
