African Orphan Crops Consortium 2019 Progress Report

The AOCC’s goal is to sequence, assemble and annotate the genomes of 101 traditional African food crops that rural Africans know and understand, to allow scientists to efficiently improve the crops’ nutritional quality, productivity, climate resilience and disease and pest resistance, while training African scientists to best use the genetic information.
Ultimately, the objectives are to ensure that African plant breeders have access to and knowledge of ways to integrate the latest genomic technologies and tools to efficiently develop and release improved varieties of orphan crops to smallholder farmers for cultivation. By this means, both diets and farmers’ incomes are improved, allowing the 600 million people who live in rural Africa to grow their own food and nutrition security and support a growing urban population in Africa.