About

With the endorsement of the African Union, the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) has the greater integration of orphan crops into African food systems at its heart. To support this, its goal is to sequence, assemble and annotate the genomes of 101 traditional African food crops, to facilitate their genetic improvement. Once genomes have been sequenced, AOCC explores genetic diversity in depth in a ‘germplasm’ panel of each crop. The chosen crops were identified in a participatory manner by scientists, development practitioners, consumers and producers as being important for supporting African consumers’ diets and farmers’ incomes. The genomic information produced by AOCC is put into the public domain for use by plant breeders and other crop scientists. The ultimate objective is to ensure that the improved varieties and cultivars of orphan crops developed with the support of genomic information are released to farmers for cultivation.

With teaching based at ICRAF, AOCC also conducts a training program for Africa’s plant breeders, to enable them to use advanced breeding methods. This initiative, dubbed the African Plant Breeding Academy, led by UC Davis (AfPBA), draws on an international team of instructors from both the public and private sectors, and will train a total of 150 African plant breeders by the end of 2020. These breeders work on a wide range of crops and production systems, and learn from each other as well as from the instructors.

This capacity building effort will empower national-level breeding programs. It is expected to strengthen the long-term capacity to breed adapted and productive crops at an institutional level, nationally, regionally and globally. The academy encourages its graduates to work on orphan crops.

Founding partners of AOCC include the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD, formerly the New Partnership for African Development), World Agroforestry (ICRAF), Mars Inc., the University of California Davis (UCD) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Since its start, another 38 partners have joined the movement to alleviate malnutrition and end stunting in Africa. Read more

AOCC has received generous in-kind support from its current partners. It further welcomes the involvement of new partners interested in human nutrition, crop breeding and orphan crops.

Here is a list of crops to be sequenced

The AOCC partnership works to ensure the availability of nutritious orphan crops to consumers in Africa by promoting their production, through the adoption of modern breeding methods for crop improvement purposes. It does this through:

The development of next-generation genomic resources for a collection of 101 African orphan crops. These comprise a mixture of annuals and perennials (the latter are mostly trees) which provide a range of different foods. The chosen crops are in many cases indigenous to Africa; however, some are exotic and were introduced in the past to the continent. The common feature is that they are all relatively under-researched.
For each of these crops, it undertakes whole genome sequencing, followed by re-sequencing of germplasm panels of 100 accessions of each crop, and transcriptome sequencing. Through this work, it develops tools to assess genetic diversity in crops and to support breeding programs. All the information obtained is made publicly available.
The African plant breeders are trained to use these resources at the African Plant Breeding Academy, led by UC Davis.