Proponent
African Orphan Crop Consortium (AOCC) founders Ibrahim Mayaki, Chief Executive Officer of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Planning and Coordinating Agency; Tony Simons, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre; Howard Shapiro, Chief Agricultural Officer of Mars, Incorporated.
Date/Timeframe and location
2011–present and beyond; global players; focus on all of sub-Saharan Africa
Main responsible entity
African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC)
Nutrition context
Effort to sequence the genomes of 101 key sub-Saharan African food crops and teach 250 African plant scientists to resequence and use the results to breed more nutritious, hardier, more productive food crop varieties, mainly the sort already grown in the back gardens of the 600 million people who live in rural Africa. This effort will complement efforts to improve availability of nutrient-dense foods, improve dietary diversity, enhance small scale farmer’s incomes and reduce reliance on imports.
Key characteristics of the food system(s) considered
Garden food crops, “orphan” in the sense that they have not been a focus of scientific investigation because they are not internationally traded commodities. Yet these are the crops that Africa grows and eats. Give poor transportation, infrastructure, storage and marketing systems in much of rural Africa, improving the crops already on the farms will radically improve nutrition.
Key characteristics of the investment made
Some $40 million raised in cash or in kind for transport and training of scientists at the AOCC’s African Plant Breeding Academy (AfPBA) at the World Agroforestry Center, Nairobi; reagents and equipment for the AOCC’s genomics lab at the Center, now the best equipped in Africa.
Key actors and stakeholders involved (including through south-south/triangular exchanges, if any)
African governments, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, Agricultural Research Council (Pretoria), Biosciences eastern and central Africa- International Livestock Research Institute, BGI (Shenzhen, China), Google (Mountain View, USA), Illumina Inc., Cyverse (Tucson, USA), LGC (Hoddesdon, UK), Mars, Incorporated (Maclean, USA) New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), Thermo Fisher Scientific (Waltham, USA,) UNICEF, University of California at Davis (USA), VIB and Plant Systems Biology at the University of Gent (Belgium): Wageningen University (Netherlands, World AgroForestry Centre ICRAF (Nairobi), World Wildlife Federation (DC)
The AOCC also works through a network of other organizations involved in the agriculture and horticulture of Africa, from the African Bean Consortium to the World Vegetable Centre.
Key changes (intended and unintended) as a result of the investment/s
By the end of 2017, more than 80 plant scientists will have been trained and 44 species sequenced. Graduates continue to have access to the equipment in the (AfPBA) lab in Nairobi. AOCC had not foreseen that some of these students (six so far) would go back to their home countries such as Ethiopia and raise money to start national orphan crop consortiums (OCCs). There has also been interest in developing OCCs in countries such as India and China. Given that the FAO has become a Consortium collaborator, the AOCC seems to have given “orphan crops” their rightful and important place in any nutrition strategy.
Challenges faced
Coordinating a consortium with members all over the globe.; bringing scientists from what is all over Africa to Nairobi for classes, importing lab equipment and reagents. Future challenges will be distributing the improved cultivars and providing education in their use to farmers, but partners are available for this.
Lessons/Key messages
Teaching African scientists to improve the crops that Africans already grow and eat is a powerful tool for improving nutrition. It can work elsewhere in the developing world. It is essentially the way that more developed countries developed their agriculture.
African Orphan Crops Consortium