The seed experts at University of California Davis had run a number of corporate trainings on plant breeding, but this time things were different. 

This time, the trainers were going to be working in Africa, and all of the students would be attending on scholarship. The standard curriculum would need to be overhauled, and new logistical hurdles would have to be overcome. 

But the extra effort was worth it, says Dr. Allen Van Deynze, director of research at UC Davis’s Seed Biotechnology Center, and a coordinator of the new African Plant Breeding Academy (AfPBA). 

With technical and logistical support from the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Van Deynze and his colleagues spent a total of six weeks training 21 African scientists how to breed more resilient and nutritious varieties of the crops that are essential to smallholder farmers across sub-Saharan Africa. The first graduates threw their caps in the air at a ceremony at ICRAF headquarters in Nairobi in December. 

“It was a really good moment,” Van Deynze says. “It was clear that [the students] got it… There’s no doubt that these plant breeders are going to make a difference.”

“I don’t think there’s any way we could have done it without ICRAF,” he adds. “The quality of the facilities and the people that are supporting us was really incredible.”

The Academy is the result of a partnership between UC Davis, ICRAF, and a number of other collaborators, many of which provided substantial in-kind support. The idea for the academy emerged from the African Orphan Crop Consortium (AOCC), a public-private partnership that aims to genetically sequence 101 traditional African food crops, with the aim of developing more robust produce with higher nutritional content.

The next session of the AfPBA will start in June 2015, with further trainings expected over the next four years. Eventually, UC Davis wants to hand over the training to African scientists, so that the Academy can be for Africans, by Africans, Van Deynze says, adding:  “Our goal is to make ourselves obsolete.” 

But UC Davis won’t be leaving the ICRAF campus anytime soon. Van Deynze says that he and colleagues at ICRAF have already started to develop new grant proposals and explore other ways to collaborate. 

“It’s been a great partnership,” he says. “The people we’re working with at ICRAF are fantastic. Their enthusiasm is contagious.”