Dr. Mavis Owusuaa Osei-Wusu, Lecturer and Team Lead, Rice Improvement Programme at the West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI), University of Ghana, is co-leading a new collaborative research project with Professor Uta Paszkowski of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge. The project, titled “Cultivating Resilience: Harnessing Beneficial Fungi for Nutrient Efficiency in Cereal Crops in Ghana,” has been awarded a £20,000 grant under the Mastercard Foundation and University of Cambridge Climate Resilience and Sustainability Research Fund (CReSus RF).
The CReSus RF aims to foster innovative, integrated, and interdisciplinary responses to climate and sustainability challenges across Africa by supporting cutting-edge research, capacity building, and skills development for the next generation.
The newly funded project builds on a partnership formed in November 2023 between the Crop Science Centre at the University of Cambridge and WACCI, University of Ghana. This collaboration previously enabled the installation of a greenhouse funded by the Allan & Gill Gray Foundation at the Cambridge Crop Science Centre. The facility facilitated a pilot experiment to assess the performance of Ghanaian rice and maize varieties under low-nutrient conditions and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) application with Dr. Pearl Abu, WACCI’s Maize Improvement Lead, as a Co-PI, contributing her expertise to the maize component of the project.
The new funding will enable the research team to extend this work by conducting advanced molecular and nutrient analyses to better understand AMF’s role in nutrient use efficiency; training young researchers and students at WACCI in molecular techniques such as gene expression analysis; investigating AMF’s impact on rice yield using mutant plant material; and identifying high-performing rice and maize lines for potential use in future breeding programmes aimed at low-input agriculture.
Dr. Osei-Wusu expressed her excitement about receiving the prestigious grant, noting its potential to advance WACCI’s efforts in promoting sustainable agriculture. She described the project as “a step toward reducing the use of inorganic fertilisers, which are both costly for smallholder farmers and harmful to the environment.”
