Presented at the African Plant Breeders Association (APBA) maiden conference in Accra, Ghana, on Oct. 23, 2019 by Jean-Marcel Ribaut, IBP Director.

1. 15 years of collaborative work to
modernize breeding in Africa: the bad,
the good and the very good news!
Jean-Marcel Ribaut
23-25 October, 2019
APBA, Accra
Enabling the Plant Breeding Revolution

2. Where are we coming from
Enabling the Plant Breeding Revolution

3. Challenges: The very big picture
 Population growth and urbanization are generating
growing and differentiated food and nutritional needs
 Increased emphasis on food for quality and processing
 In developing countries, the gap between potential yield
and farm yield is huge (5 to 10 times)
 Slow variety replacement in farmers’ fields
 It isn’t so much a problem of genetic gain per se, but for what
 Without a reasonable crop value chain in place breeding is useless
 Time to run Breeding 4 Investment

4. Linking upstream and applied science
From Cornell to African farmers’ fields with a stopover in Brazil
 Step 1: Competitive project (2004)
 Led by Cornell, in collaboration with EMBRAPA
 Plantlets screened under hydroponics – Alt1 gene cloned
Magalhaes et al. 2007, Nature Genetics, 39: 1156-1151
 Step 2: Competitive project (2007)
 Led by EMBRAPA in collaboration with Cornell
 Favourable alleles identified – Improved germplasm for
Brazil
Caniato et al. 2011, PLoS One 6, e20830.
 Step 3: Commissioned work (2009)
 Led by Moi University in collaboration with EMBRAPA
and ICRISAT
 Introgression of favourable alleles – Improved
germplasm for Kenya and Niger
The power of pooling expertise (GCP)
Enabling the Plant Breeding Revolution
Product catalogue: www.generationcp.org/impact/product-catalogue
GCP stories: http://www.generationcp.org/sunsetblog/

5. Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP)
 We are enabling and supporting national programme breeders
to play a leading role in R4D (R 4 Investment) by offering them
access to modern breeding technologies, breeding
materials and related information in a centralised,
integrated and practical manner
 Improve breeding effectiveness and efficiency (Data management, MB)
 Increase quality control (data, seed, pipelines)
 Enable data sharing and analysis across teams/projects/institutes
Establish institutional data memory and ownership (staff turnover, IP)
 Institutional visibility, facilitate networking and fund raising
 A must have to start with good practices along the value chain
Breeding Management System (BMS) the core product of the IBP
Enabling the Plant Breeding Revolution
Benefits and added value

6. What have we learnt
GCP (2004-2015, 170M US$)
IBP (2009-ongoing, 40M US$)
Enabling the Plant Breeding Revolution

7. The mixed news in Africa
An increasing number of initiatives in the arena of
modernizing breeding in Africa
 More workforces and resources are welcome, there is room
for everybody and a lot of work to be done
 But the effort must be well coordinated and there is no need
to reinvent the wheel (lessons learnt)
Major gap in capacity (human and infrastructure)
across the different NARIs
 Most international initiatives take a stepwise approach, and
there is a clear emergence of leader Institutions
 The gap amongst countries is increasing and too much
reliance on too few individuals
There is a clear need for better coordination across different donor
initiatives and more collaboration across projects and countries
A clear role for the APBA to be a unified voice of the community!

8. The theory of change
Proof of
Concept
Knowledge
transfer
Witold Kwasnicki : Evolutionary Model of Industrial Dynamics
http://kwasnicki.prawo.uni.wroc.pl/?page_id=387
Kindly provided by Mike Olsen
• Substantive improvement requires significant changes
• There are different ways and means to reach the top
• In most cases, to go to the top you need first to go down
Program Optimization Module Engagement
Stop saying we don’t do it that way because this is not the most effective way!

9. The good news
 The formation of the APBA
 The vehicle for promoting plant breeding as an essential part of the
African food revolution, a mechanism to speak with one voice
 Critical forum for exchange between professionals and the new
generation of breeders, and extension workers (hopefully)
 Increasing number of effective African breeding networks
 Increasing role of SROs
 Crop, geography and ecological zones
 Germplasm exchange to bring allelic diversity
 Increasing multisite testing (PAN African varietal trial, SIL)
 Proven marker technologies (QC, forward breeding, introgression)
 The technologies are available
 Most, if not all, technologies to run effective modern breeding
programmes are available to African breeders
 Big improvement in IT services and better access to service laboratories
 Increasing local support services (IBP)

10. z
PI: David Okello (Uganda)
Seed multiplication in Uganda
300 accessions
Phenotypic evaluation across
countries of East & South
Africa (y2 and 3)
PI: Daniel Fonceka
(Senegal)
• Seed multiplication in
Senegal of 300
accessions
• Phenotypic evaluation
across 6 countries of
West Africa (y2 and 3)
Collection and Genotyping of 1050 African accessions
PIs: Daniel Fonceka (Senegal), Peggy Ozias-Akins
(UGA)
Genotyping of 2500
US accessions with
African origin
Seed increase and
phenotyping of
selected US
germplasm in
Senegal
PI: Peggy Ozias-
Akins (UGA)
Phenotypic
evaluation of single
set of 300
accessions in
Senegal
BMS
deployment in
East Africa
PI: David Okello
May
2018
OCT
2019
APR
2019
2020
2021
Aug
2022
PIL commissioned project - done IBP-led, IFAD project - on goingPIL competitive projects on going
Ensuring data quality
and facilitating data
exchange
define two regional reference sets
for Africa
Identification of US
germplasm diversity that
could be reintroduced in
Africa
Introgression in
African reference
sets
Bringing diversity and new alleles for groundnut
breeding in Africa: Peanut Innovation Lab (UGA)
Enabling the Plant Breeding Revolution
Major outputs:
 Direct selection of good performing lines in local environments
 Identification of new elite alleles via association studies
Phenotypic
evaluation of single
set of 300
accessions in
Uganda

11. Web services
API
Large scale data
(Phenotyping)
(Genotyping)
Shared File Storage
(Genome hub)
(Seed catalogue)
Crop information
system
Breeders
Users of other
systems
Meta data
(GIS)
(Agroecology)
Germplasm
Pedigree
Data
capture
Ontology
Seed Inventory
System
Trial
nursery
Analytics
Crop Modeling
Data capture
Comprehensive crop data management

12. The very good news
 Tremendous improvements in the academic teaching at a
number of African Universities
 MSc and PhD
 Most PhD students work in NARIs
 Practical work related to country-based breeding priorities
 Stronger interaction with Universities outside Africa
 New breeding initiatives focuses on local and market demand
 Most new breeding projects aim at implementing:
• A demand led breeding approach
• Operational crop value chain (access to seed and inputs)
• The flow of information/knowledge and products along the chain
 There is a clear momentum for change and the key
ingredients are available:
 Technology, human resources, networks and resources
 The cooks are ready, eagerness of local actors to change
 APBA to facilitate the development of new recipes

13. The EBCA project
Enhancing institutional Breeding Capacity in Ghana,
Senegal and Uganda to develop climate resilient crops for
African smallholder farmers:
 Ultimate beneficiaries: Smallholder farmers (10,000/country)
 Direct beneficiaries:
 National breeding programmes (4 partner institutes; 10-15 programmes)
 Universities (12 MSc, 5 PhD students), at least 40% participation by
women
 Pillar 1 – Delivery chain and knowledge platform: Connecting the
dots between breeders, extension workers and farmers
 Pillar 2 – Improved data management and digitalising breeding
 Pillar 3 – Breeding: integrating modern approaches
 Pillar 4 – Capacity enhancement (human and infrastructure)
A project coordinated by the IBP in collaboration with AfricaRice,
implemented by NARIs and supported by IFAD over 3 years (2018-21)
Enabling the Plant Breeding Revolution

14. Conclusions
 There are opportunities for greater collaboration and coordination
across plant breeding initiatives in Africa
 There are models that work successfully: GCP, IAVAO, EBCA,ILs….
 Is there a role for the APBA in all of this? I believe so!
 The technologies for modern breeding are available to most, if not
all, plant breeders in Africa
 It is up to institutions’ management to ensure and commit they have
the capability to access these technologies
 It is up to individual plant breeders/ teams, champions, to use the
best available technologies
 Implementation of new approaches is as much a managerial
challenge as a scientific and logistical one (cultural change)
 Market demand is dynamic as populations urbanise and
consumer preferences change;
 It is up to plant breeders to meet the needs of these changing
markets
So, clearly some challenges must be addressed, but the future
of plant breeding in Africa is increasingly bright, so pretty good
news overall!

15. It is time to claim the mountain!!!
Merci beaucoup!
Oku
Drakensberg
BMS workshop this afternoon!