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WACCI to host maiden African Plant Breeders conference

By Iddi Yire, GNA

Accra, July 21, GNA – The West Africa Centre
for Crop Improvement (WACCI) of the University of Ghana, will host the maiden
edition of the African Plant Breeders Association (APBA) conference from
October 23 – 25.

Professor Eric Y. Danquah, the Founding
Director, WACCI, said plant scientists from Africa and the world over were
expected to participate in this maiden Conference for conversations on
important issues aimed at the establishment of partnerships needed to work
towards meeting Sustainable Development Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food
security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

Prof Danquah, who doubles as the Interim
President of APBA, said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA)
on the sideline of the graduation of the University of Ghana; during which
WACCI’s 15 PhD students in Plant Breeding and seven Master of Philosophy
(MPhil) students in Seed Science and Technology graduated.

This brings to 81 and 14 students in PhD
Plant Breeding and Seed Science and Technology respectively who have graduated
out of the WACCI programme since its inception in 2007.

The 15 PhD students comprise four females
and 11 males from seven countries including: Ghana, South Sudan, Nigeria,
Niger, Senegal, Togo, and Uganda.

This year’s graduating class of the MPhil
programme includes two females and five males from three countries – Ghana,
Mali, and Senegal.

The graduating students were sponsored under
the following projects and organisations: the West Africa Agricultural
Productivity Programme, Intra-ACP, USAID, Purdue – Sorghum and Millet
Innovation Lab, Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, the
DAAD-Germany, African Union-European Union project and the World Bank.

WACCI runs one of the largest PhD programmes
in Plant Breeding globally.

Prof Danquah said WACCI was calling on
public and private institutions concerned about Africa’s food future to
contribute to and support the Centre to transform into a world class
research-intensive institution for the transformation of Agriculture in Ghana
and beyond

He said WACCI’s graduates have become game
changers in many breeding programmes in the sub-region and would be the cadres
who would impact food and nutrition security in Africa in the decades ahead.

“Africa is changing, bringing new challenges
that must be addressed if we are to live in a world without hunger, food
insecurity and malnutrition. As a major step to overcoming the challenges that
resource poor farmers face in Africa, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in
Africa (AGRA) provided seed funds for the establishment of the WACCI as a
semi-autonomous institution in the University of Ghana in 2007,” he said.

“Today, WACCI has evolved into the leading
World Bank Africa Centres of Excellence (ACE) for postgraduate education in
Plant Breeding on the continent. Funded through a financial agreement between
the Government of Ghana and the International Development Association, the ACE
project aims to improve the quality of postgraduate education in selected
universities through regional specialisation and collaboration.”

Speaking to the GNA, three of the WACCI PhD
graduates – Dr Leander Dede Melomey of Ghana; Dr Saba Baba Mohammed of Nigeria
and Dr Elisabeth Diatta of Senegal, expressed their gratitude to God, their
sponsors and the WACCI for supporting them to achieve their goal.

The trio promised to use the knowledge and
skills they had acquired at the University of Ghana to help ensure food and
nutrition security in Africa.

Dr Melomey, whose research work centred on
tomato, dubbed “Development of High Yielding Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.)
Lines with Resistance to Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Disease (TYLCD)|”, said tomato
was a very important vegetable crop in Ghana; stating that her research was
very critical to finding a lasting solution to the tomato yellow leaf curl
disease in the country.

GNA

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