Dr Benjamin Dowiya Nzawele, 42, arrived at the World Agroforestry Centre, also known as ICRAF, in Nairobi with an important brief from his national agricultural research institute: To “identify orphan crops not currently taken into account by INERA, their contribution in the context of climate change and how to improve them”.
The scientist from the L’Institut National pour l’Etude et la Recherche Agronomique (INERA) station at Mulungu in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) had come to ICRAF to attend the African Plant Breeding Academy (AfPBA), where he and 28 other senior plant breeders from Africa are learning new genomic methods for plant breeding. But he had already been out of his duty station for some time.