Africa’s hungry and malnourished population has almost tripled over the past three and a half decades, from 88 million in the early 1970s to more than 233 million. The continent remains food insecure despite remedial measures delineated in several resolutions, publications and conferences. Persistent low productivity and incomes have hindered access to food. Food insecurity is further exacerbated by high population growth rates and climate change which exert overwhelming pressures on food supply systems. The continent remains a net food importer and continues to suffer recurrent hunger problems, notwithstanding that agriculture is central to Africa’s survival and growth, employing some 70 percent of the continent’s workforce and generating on average 30 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It is estimated that most crops which feed and clothe the people of the continent are yet to experience a whopping 80% of their yield potential. Africa therefore urgently needs to increase crop productivity to help ensure food security along with an increase in incomes in the agricultural sector. Plant Breeding programmes are critical to Africa’s ability to increase food production. However, a major limitation to plant breeding in sub-Saharan Africa is that most of its indigenous crops such as sorghum, millet, cassava, yam, plantain, cocoyam, taro, bambara, groundnut and cowpea are of little or no importance to scholars in the developed world, who have therefore neglected them in their research.

It was against this backdrop of low agricultural productivity coupled with Africa’s acute brain drain and the need to train plant breeders in West and Central Africa, that WACCI was established. 

In May 2005, Professor Eric Yirenkyi Danquah, then Head of the Department of Crop Science at the University of Ghana, visited Cornell University to explore opportunities for collaboration in the plant sciences. During the visit, he made a presentation on ‘Research in Plant Genetics and Biotechnology at the Department of Crop Science, University of Ghana’ to Cornell’s Institute for Genomic Diversity (IGD). The visit initiated collaborations with Dr. Stephen Kresovich, then Director for the IGD in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). Dr. Kresovich and Dr. Theresa Fulton, Director of Research at the IGD, travelled to the University of Ghana in February 2006 to participate in a workshop to develop a curriculum for a Master’s Degree programme in Agricultural Biotechnology under a World Bank funded Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund (TALIF) project led by Professor Danquah. 

The workshop was very fruitful and necessitated another visit to Cornell University for follow-up discussions. In May 2006, Professor Danquah paid a second visit to Cornell University, along with Professor Kwame Offei (a collaborator on the TALIF project), to extend the range of contacts earlier established there and initiate the Agricultural Biotechnology programme. A meeting with Dr. Tim Setter, who Professor Danquah had met a year earlier at a Conference in Nairobi, led Professors Danquah and Offei to Dr. Ronnie Coffman, International Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics and Director of International Programmes in CALS. In their interaction with Dr. Coffman, he informed Professors Danquah and Offei about potential opportunities in the area of plant breeding. He also mentioned that Mr. Bill Gates would be announcing a partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation to support the Program for Africa’s Seed Systems (PASS) which could provide the wherewithal for establishing in a West African university a centre similar to the African Centre for Crop Improvement (ACCI) based at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa.

 Under the leadership of Professor Danquah, the University of Ghana team developed a concept note to explore the possibility of securing a grant from potential donors for such a project. By the time the Program for Africa’s Green Revolution (ProGRA), now the Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA) was established in 2006 with investments from the Bill and Melinda Gates and the Rockefeller Foundations, a proposal had been developed to access funding to establish the West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI). Unknown to Professors Danquah and Offei, at the time they were exploring opportunities for collaborations at Cornell, Dr. Joseph DeVries of the Rockefeller Foundation, Nairobi had commissioned Dr. Eugene Terry, the first Director General of the West Africa Rice Development Association, WARDA (now AfricaRice) to conduct a scoping study on a suitable location for the crop improvement centre for West Africa. Dr. Eugene Terry was to assess five Universities in West Africa for their capacity to host a Regional Centre for Plant Breeding and was, coincidentally, working with Dr. Ronnie Coffman and Mr. Stefan Einarson, Director of Transnational Learning at the CALS, Cornell University. The team made site visits to the Universities and held discussions with management and key staff including the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Clifford Nii Boi Tagoe. The Consultants recommended that the University of Ghana should be selected to host the Centre for West Africa and that Professor Eric Yirenkyi Danquah should be named by ProGRA as the Founding Director of the Centre. 

The recommendations were accepted by ProGRA and an agreement was signed between ProGRA and the University of Ghana for the establishment of WACCI for a 10-year project period with seed funding of USD11.5 million. This was preceded by two proposals, one developed by an Implementation Committee established by ProGRA and a revised one by a team at the University of Ghana. The members of the WACCI Implementation Committee were: Dr. Eugene Terry (Independent Consultant, Chairman), Dr. Ronnie Coffman, Dr. Vern Gracen, Mr. Stefan Einarson (all of Cornell University), Professor Mark Laing (University of KwaZulu- Natal), Professor Eric Danquah and Professor Kwame Offei. The members of the UG team that developed the final proposal were Professor Eric Danquah (Principal Investigator) and Professor Kwame Offei. WACCI started operating from the College of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences in June 2007 following the process of approval by the various boards and the Council of the University. 

The Centre was officially launched by the Minister of State for Tertiary Education, Miss Elizabeth Ohene, and the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Clifford Nii Boi Tagoe, on March 13, 2008. When the University Collegiate structure became operational on August 1, 2014, WACCI was approved as one of the constituent Units of the College of Basic and Applied Sciences. The Foundation members of the Management Team were :  Professor Eric Yirenkyi Danquah, Director; Professor Samuel Kwame Offei, Associate Director, Research; Dr. Vernon Gracen (Emeritus Professor, Cornell University), Associate Director, Teaching and Curriculum Development WACCI was established as a parallel Centre to the ACCI of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) that trains African plant breeders. It was structured as a partnership between UG and Cornell University with funding from AGRA to train African Plant Breeders in Africa working on improving African crops in local environments under local climatic conditions. Initially offering only PhD training in Plant Breeding, in 2015 the Centre launched an innovative Master’s Programme in Seed Science and Technology under the auspices of the World Bank funded ACE project.  

The Centre has also expanded its scope of focus countries over the years to include students outside West and Central Africa. WACCI therefore trains plant breeders and seed scientists from all over Africa. Working with over 40 national, regional and international partners, WACCI equips the next generation of plant breeders and seed scientists with the requisite knowledge and skills for Africa’s agricultural transformation.  Since its inception, the Centre has enrolled 160 PhD and 95 MPhil students from 20 African countries, with 117 PhD and 50 MPhil graduates to date. These graduates are now transforming breeding programmes of National Agricultural Research Institutes (NARIs) in their home countries. Most of them have published their research in peer-reviewed journals, released superior crop varieties, won competitive start-up grants and are leading the revival of crop improvement programmes in many of their home countries/ institutions.