The West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI) has graduated 81 PhDs – of which 31 are women – drawn from 12 countries since its inception in 2008, the centre’s founder and director, Eric Danquah, has told University World News. In an interview, Danquah said the centre, based at the University of Ghana, has so far enrolled 128 PhD and 49 MPhil candidates from 19 countries across Africa. WACCI is a partnership between International Programs in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (IP-CALS) at Cornell University in the United States and the University of Ghana. The centre is “based on the concept to train Africans for African problems in Africa”, said Danquah, and takes its inspiration from the African Centre for Crop Improvement (ACCI) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa which trains “African plant breeders in Africa, working on African crops in African environments”. Danquah said the centre was set up with an initial grant of US$11.5 million provided by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to train plant breeders from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Mali, Niger and, later, Cameroon. “This programme has trained 53 PhDs under AGRA’s Program for Africa’s Seed Systems,” he said. Currently, the programme has students from Ghana, Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Togo, Benin, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania and Malawi.
Centre of Excellence
The centre is also a World Bank Africa Centre of Excellence project. Danquah said the World Bank has provided US$8 million to support training in science and technology, producing graduates who have helped to boost national crop improvement programmes in the sub-region. Danquah said WACCI has about 30 faculty who come from the school of humanities, school of agriculture and school of engineering and converge at WACCI to teach. WACCI has also attracted visiting lectures from around the world to train Africans for African problems in Africa. “WACCI has been accredited by the National Accreditation Board (NAB) [of Ghana] and has received international accreditation for its postgraduate programmes from the Agency for Quality Assurance through Accreditation of Study Programs (AQAS), Germany,” he said. Danquah said he was proud that the centre has within its few years of existence been able to train graduates who can be compared with those produced anywhere in the world. And research production is growing too. “We have not only produced quality graduates but, notable among our achievements, has been to turn out 165 publications from students and faculty,” said Danquah.
Youth training
He said the centre has been able to breed over 60 seed varieties in four countries in addition to collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to train youth in agriculture, as well as breeding three hybrids of maize. Danquah said the centre has also embarked on a project to work with the private sector to produce 30,000 kilograms of certified seed by 2020. “We have also launched a US$50 million endowment fund, which is not making much progress,” he added. The centre is preparing to launch a new project in March 2020. "This is a new project that allows WACCI to evolve into an ‘Agriculture Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institution’ with a focus on specific commodities including soybean, cassava, tomato, maize and cowpea. Nonetheless, we shall work on a number of other crops," he said. Danquah’s success in founding and managing WACCI was recognised when he was awarded the 2018 World Agriculture Prize from the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for Agricultural and Life Sciences, held in China. Danquah is the first African to be awarded the prize.
Source: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20191016071849374 - Francis Kokutse 17 October 2019