Farmers’ Day 2019. DS Interview I: Our doctor for a green Ghana

The benign look, mild manners and professorial attention to detail belie the iron intent of Eric Yirenkyi Danquah. The sixtysomething plant geneticist has made his mark on applied sciences in Africa in ways that are making a big difference to millions of lives – and received international recognition for his efforts, winning the World Agriculture Prize in October 2018 in Nanjing, the first African to do so. But it is clear from the start of our engrossing conversation that this academician has no time to rest on his laurels. The main problems preoccupying his hyperactive mind are how to improve productivity for farmers and how to find the means to ensure that the research absorbing a new generation of African scientists has commercial muscle packed around it.

 

The politics of his position as founder director of the groundbreaking West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement are of little interest to him. What drives him is the effect of his work in the world.

“My whole life, everything that has happened, has been for a purpose,” he says, as if it were some casual comment about the weather. “I’m happy that we’re able to impact.”

 

“Let me do this”

The light-filled, high-ceilinged offices of the West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (or WACCI, pronounced “wacky”) stand out on the University of Ghana campus at Legon. The Centre oozes efficiency, modernity, purpose – a far cry from the atmosphere in some other corners of the university.

But WACCI has come a long way. From squatting in the Department of International Programmes and squeezing its back office into a staff flat, the Centre has reinvented itself as a haven for focusing on challenges faced by Africa’s farmers, attracting postgraduate students from 18 countries.

The sparkling offices are the fruit of a partnership with Cornell University in the United States, one which arguably could only have come about with Professor Danquah’s talent for networking. Yet he describes himself as just one star in a constellation, referring to his class as “destined for some of the best places in Ghana”. The small boy from Aburi who schooled in Akosombo is a product of a past Science and Maths Quiz champion institution.

Stepping into the future: (l-r) Ebenezer Oduro, Vice-Chancellor, University of Ghana; Yaw Twumasi, chairman of the university Council; and Dr Danquah at WACCI

 

“In 1977, when we went to our first sixth-form class in Presec, our headmaster said, ‘Some of you who took O’ level elective agriculture should take it up to sixth form because agric is going to be one of the biggest things.’ None of my friends listened to him. I didn’t quite know where I was going, but I said to myself, ‘Let me do this.’ And with the benefit of hindsight, I could have done no better thing than what I did.”

His first degree at Legon did not come easily: a car accident left him with multiple fractures and confined to a hospital bed as his peers sat their final exams in 1982. Then the following year Legon was on strike, so he did not receive his degree until 1984. “Yet I was one of the first among my classmates to receive a PhD,” he muses.

A six-month stint as an intern in Neunkirchen, Germany, opened his eyes to the power of modern agriculture. “I lived with a farming family – a couple and their children – and we farmed an area about the size of Madina,” specialising in cereals and dairy.

Returning to Ghana for national service, he won a scholarship to the elite Cambridge University in England. Here he thrived, gaining an MPhil in plant breeding.

Most of his Ghanaian peers studying in the UK began doing everything they could to stay abroad, but Danquah was in a hurry to move back to the home country once he had his Master’s. He was recruited by his old university and returned to work as an assistant lecturer at Legon for two years. Another opportunity opened up in 1989 with a second full Commonwealth scholarship, and he returned to Cambridge, where he completed his doctorate in four years, defending a thesis on cross-bred barley.

 

Grow the space

The calls started coming in from American colleges but still he resisted. “I presented a paper in Minneapolis at the end of my PhD and Cornell University wanted me there for a post-doctorate. I said, ‘No! Me? Post-doc? America? Never.’

“My supervisor in Cambridge said, ‘Eric, I don’t understand you. Why do you want to go back to Ghana?’ I said to him, ‘John, your queen made all this gold money from Ghana. Ghana is the place of gold.’ I don’t know what gave me the gravitas to pitch like that. And I didn’t really know what I had in Ghana, because my two years after my Master’s in Ghana were rough. But even then, after my PhD I rushed back to Ghana – just when there were opportunities. So I started.”

He describes the next decade, from 1994 to 2004, as “my challenging years”. There were next to facilities. He had no access to computers to assist his research. “My only pride was the students: smart guys – ladies and gentlemen – I encountered here,” he recalls

He also found quiet help from a small group of individuals who supported his work, in no expectation of return. Among them was the future Minister for Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, lately returned to Ghana to establish Databank. He supplied Danquah with his first computers.

“And then at the end of 2004 I got a grant from the World Bank’s Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund. It was a World Bank Ghana project and it was competitive. They invited all faculty within higher education to apply. I was privileged to be one of the first grantees.

“Before then I’d received only small sums – but this was $187,000. It was big money for me,” he says, laughing: “in fact, big money for anyone.”

He decided to return to Cornell to consult the senior fellow there who had tried to recruit him.

“The World Bank money was to develop a curriculum in agricultural biotechnology. I trained in molecular genetics. We are engineers in crops: we design crops which give you better-quality food. We try to identify parents that can give you better offspring. You select among the offspring and take forward those that can give you what you desire. Plant breeding has to do with the man-directed evolution of crop plants.”

At Danquah’s invitation, the American don willingly travelled to Accra and they developed a curriculum for launching a postgraduate course in biotechnology. Danquah describes the course content and structure as “super” but he couldn’t secure the back-up he needed to enrol students and develop a staff.

Visiting librarians from Cornell

 

Nevertheless, he remained clear about his goal then, as he is now. “I tell people in high places that any nation which trains over 95 per cent of its smartest scientists abroad can never develop. So what we must do is to ensure that we develop the higher education space to a level that can allow us to compete with the best in the world.”

 

The plant takes root

Danquah maintained his working relationship with Cornell, and this proved to be the stimulus he needed to take off. Links through his colleague/collaborator led to a meeting with Ronnie Coffman, director of international programmes at the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at Cornell University. Their first encounter coincided with an important appointment for Danquah.

“I’d gone to Cornell this time with my friend and colleague Kwame Offei, the current Pro-Vice-Chancellor for academic and student affairs at Legon. He was then Dean of Agriculture and I was named that week as Dean of International Programmes.”

 

“This whole thing that we have done here is because of
the people I chose to work with”

Coffman at once showed an interest in working with his Ghanaian counterpart. Danquah confided in him about the problem. “I said, ‘I’m getting depressed about capacity in Africa. All my smart students, after they finish my class at Level 400, leave and don’t come back. I want to roll out a graduate programme which attracts some of them.’ That was May 2006.”

Coffman had wind of an imminent announcement involving the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates. “If that announcement comes, I think we can make progress in this,” he told Danquah. They had lunch the next day and started to plan. “That was the birth of WACCI,” Danquah recalls. “At that meeting we developed the concept.”

Institutional support followed from Cornell, as did funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which had commissioned a team to identify a host for a West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement to partner one already established in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Danquah worked hard to shape a pitch, beating off competition from Mali and Nigeria. He was on a trip to Michigan when the news came in: he had been named the founder director of WACCI, and it was to be based in Accra.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), not long established and with then UN secretary general Kofi Annan among its champions, gave Danquah and the Legon/Cornell partnership the keys to the door, committing $5.5 million to the first phase of the project. Cornell continued to provide advice and expertise.

WACCI was established in June 2007, operating out of the office that Danquah then occupied as Dean of International Programmes. “It was here that we recruited our first cohorts. Every year, under the AGRA programme, we signed up eight PhDs in plant breeding.”

WACCI’s work supports Ghana’s hard-working farmers

 

The first group of students arrived in January 2008 and were from five countries: Ghana, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Mali and Niger. Elizabeth Ohene, then Minister of State for Tertiary Education, launched WACCI officially on 12 March 2008.

“The Vice-Chancellor, Clifford Tagoe, was there. The Registrar, Teddy Konu, my best friend and mentor, was there,” says Danquah, smiling at the recollection. “The Minister said she hoped we wouldn’t stay in our offices and do agriculture, but would go out into the fields. It still echoes in my mind. It challenged me: I’ve been to remote fields in Niger, Mali, Cameroon, Nigeria, Burkina Faso.”

New support trickled in: the Generation Challenge Programme allowed WACCI to recruit four more PhD students over two years. In 2013 AGRA renewed its commitment, putting up another $5 million. Old friends continued to lend support: Ken Ofori-Atta served as chairman of the council of the College of Agricultural and Consumer Sciences for four years, leaving in 2014 when the university dissolved the College of Agricultural and Consumer Sciences.

 

Flying the flagships

“We have turned out 53 PhD students for AGRA,” says Danquah, his excitement palpable. “Over our 12 years to date, we have recruited 127 PhD students and graduated 81 PhDs. In seven successive graduations we have turned out 81 experts in plant breeding, who have returned to their home institutions and built national capacity and flagship organisations and are leading research in plant breeding.”

At least two Ghanaian researchers join the programme each year. “In Ghana, for example, Dr Maxwell Darko Asante, the rice breeder, was the National Agricultural Researcher of the Year 2018,” Professor Danquah says proudly. “President Akufo-Addo honoured him at last year’s Farmers’ Day. He is our graduate.

“Maxwell could easily have done his PhD in the United States and stayed there for ever. But he chose to do it here ...

“The PhD here changes your mindset: it obligates you to work in Africa. Maxwell is like a superstar in plant breeding today, and he is an asset to the nation at the Crops Research Institute at Fumesua in Kumasi. All of our students are making an impact on national research programmes across the continent.”

Danquah welcomes the AGRA board, including Dr Agnes Kalibata and Hailemariam Desalegn, the former Prime Minister of Ethiopia, to WACCI in September

 

Danquah’s superb efforts as an administrator and fundraiser continue to yield dividends. To date, WACCI has attracted over $25 million in direct funding. AGRA offered a start-up grant of $250,000 to finance a maize project, launched in 2009, which led to three high-yielding hybrid varieties partly responsible for this year’s bumper harvests in Ghana.

But the energetic professor thinks it’s not enough. “We want about 50 per cent of Ghanaian farmers to access our hybrid seed by next year,” he says. He is hungry for more support so that “we can scale up quickly and multiply”. Maintaining an alliance of stakeholders makes research work possible and furthers WACCI’s aims: “One [vital input] is that government must create an enabling environment … Without funding for research, universities cannot make an impact. I wish the government would create the space that makes the scaling up easier.”

A European company has expressed an interest in developing WACCI’s hybrid seed but Danquah remains cautious because of concerns about intellectual property. “You need to have a tracking mechanism on your varieties or else you lose out on your rights,” he explains. In the interim, the Centre is working with a small start-up in Koforidua to get its discoveries out to farmers.

 

New tomatoes

WACCI’s scope has evolved organically. The initial direction of research, funded by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, focused on staples which could register a quick increase in productivity by using superior hybrids and open pollinated crops.

“We targeted the cereals: rice, maize, sorghum, millet. Then the green legumes: cowpeas, groundnuts. Then we had cassava and sweet potato from among the roots and tubers – but not vegetables.

“We had to bring in a private partner [Syngenta and then the Syngenta Foundation] which gave us some scholarships to train vegetable breeders.

“We have now graduated the very first PhD in tomato breeding for this country, a lady.

“You know, a Ghana Beyond Aid has implications for products that will change the game. If you don’t have the scientists who can help you develop the tomatoes you require in this country, how can you stop importing tomatoes from Burkina Faso?”

 

Super-smart collaborators

A new World Bank project – the African Centres of Excellence project, rolled out in 2014 – has given WACCI another $13 million for associated programmes. It allows the Centre more freedom than the arrangement with AGRA.

 

“The PhD at WACCI changes your mindset: it obligates
you to work in Africa”

“Through that we can admit students from anywhere in Africa and allow them to do any science they want to do, on any crop,” Danquah says with some satisfaction. “Under the first phase of the project, the grant was only for agricultural biotechnology and programme development. So after that phase we got the programme approved by the University of Ghana.

“But you see, smart students will not come and do graduate studies in this university when they can get scholarships and go abroad. Until we roll out packages to admit and enrol students we won’t attract them. We have students whose parents just cannot afford to support them; they have competing demands.”

The good professor is not resting, still broadening his horizons. He is working on setting up a private foundation. “It will exist to unearth talent in agriculture and develop them into game-changers for Ghana. Oftentimes people are good but can’t find any help from anywhere and cannot realise their potential.

“I want to see what I can do with super-smart students. This whole thing that we have done here is because of the people I chose to work with, some of whom are among the best in the world.”

 

Source: http://thedailystatesman.com/index.php/news/item/8478-farmers-day-2019-t...