Thirty-four plant breeders graduated from the UC Davis African Plant Breeding Academy in May 2018. The advanced plant breeding course was delivered by the Seed Biotechnology Center of the University of California Davis, in collaboration with the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC). The course, hosted at the World Agroforestry Centre in Kenya, equips practicing African plant breeders with the most advanced theory and technologies in plant breeding, quantitative genetics, statistics, and experimental design to support critical decisions. This was the third cohort of the course, with participants drawn from Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
The program was delivered by a team of tutors and complemented by guest speakers, including Leena Tripathi of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) who covered banana improvement through transformation and gene editing, Damaris Achieng Odeny of International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-arid Tropics (ICRISAT) on finger millet genomics, Dusty Vyas of LGC Genomics on genotyping sequencing and DNA analysis, and Alex Lipka of the University of Illinois on genomic selection. Participants also visited the International Livestock Research Institute’s Trepathi lab and glasshouse.