WACCI Holds Workshop For Agricultural African Centres of Excellence

Front row: Prof Daniel K. Asiedu (2nd right), Acting Provost, College of Basic and Applied Sciences, UG; Prof John Gyapong (3rd right), Pro-VC, UG, in-charge of Research, Innovation and Development; Prof Eric Yirenkyi Danquah (4th right), the Director, WACCI and Prof Kwame Offei (5th right), Pro-VC, UG, in-charge of Academic and Students Affairs

A two-day workshop for the five World Bank Africa Centres of Excellence (ACEs) in agriculture, dubbed “Workshop for the Agriculture Education Front-runners in West Africa: ACEs Learning Experience at WACCI on the theme: “The march towards food security in Africa” has taken place recently.  52 participants made up of scientists, researchers, Centre and Management staff from West Africa participated in the workshop.

Welcoming participants to the workshop, Prof. Daniel K. Asiedu, Dean of the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, who stood in for the Provost of the College of Basic and Applied Sciences, Prof. Ebenezer Oduro Owusu, noted the outstanding performance of WACCI since its establishment.  He mentioned that at the July 2015 Congregation of the University, out of the 31 PhD graduates from the College, 10, making a third of the graduands were from the WACCI programme.

Prof John Gyapong, the Pro-Vice Chancellor, Research, Innovation and Development in his address, charged the ACEs to help address the problem of food insecurity in West Africa through the training of plant breeders who would develop superior crop varieties of the staple crops.  He said the West African sub-region was looking up to WACCI to churn a critical mass of quality PhD graduates who would return to their communities to bring about the needed impact.

Recounting the history of WACCI, Prof Eric Yirenkyi Danquah, Director of WACCI restated the vision of WACCI which he said was based on the premise that African Plant Breeders can be trained in an African environment to work on African crops for Africa.  On the emergence of the African Centres of Excellence, Prof. Danquah recalled that in 2013, after a rigorous, transparent and merit-based evaluation, WACCI together with four other ACEs were selected to receive eight million dollars each as a project grant from the World Bank under the agriculture category.  Thereafter, at an ACE workshop in Abuja in 2014, Centre leaders unanimously elected WACCI as the front runner of the Agricultural ACEs and recommended that WACCI shares its success stories with other Centres of Excellence.

While encouraging the ACEs to impact their countries, Prof. Danquah further called on them to be transparent in their financial transactions and open up their books for external review if they desired to progress.

Among the objectives of the Workshop was to allow the ACEs share institutional best practices and also to draw on lessons from the experiences of WACCI as a model Centre of Excellence.

At the end of the workshop, the five ACE Centre Leaders, namely, ACE for Training Plant Breeders and Seed Scientists, University of Ghana; ACE in Dry land Agriculture, Bayero University, Kano; ACE for Agricultural Development and Sustainable Environment, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta; ACE for Food Technology and Research, Benue State University, Makurdi and ACE in Poultry Sciences, University of Lomé, agreed that WACCI should lead efforts to establish a consortium of Agricultural ACEs to leverage and boost their ability to attract funding for research, development and innovation aimed at solving key problems in the agricultural value chain.

West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI) http://www.wacci.edu.gh/ was established as a partnership between Cornell University, USA and the University of Ghana to train Plant Breeders and Seed Scientists.