News

A series of five online meetings will be held from May 27 to June 9, 2020 to discuss ways of modernizing sweet potato breeding in West Africa and strengthening the community of practice for sweet potato breeding and seed in West Africa.

Organized by the International Potato Center (CIP) in collaboration with CORAF and the ECOWAS Regional Center of Excellence for Roots and Tubers based in Ghana, the meeting will discuss the development and dissemination of nutritious and productive sweet potato varieties in West Africa. The CIP is currently implementing a project to modernize sweet potato breeding in Africa, known as SweetGAINS Africa.

Here are the two specific objectives of online meetings:

• Work to create a regional community of practice for sweet potato breeding and seed in West Africa;
• Build the capacity of interested partner programs in the key elements of selection excellence, including product profiles, stage management, trial design and data management.

The times and themes of each of the five sessions are as follows:

• May 27, 10 - 12 am GMT. Regional breeding/seeding context and potential;
• May 29, 10 - 12 am GMT. Concepts of selection/semences of excellence ;
• June 1, 10 - 12 a.m. GMT. Concepts of selection/semences of excellence ;
• June 3, 10 - 12 am GMT. Strengthening links between breeding and seed systems;
• June 5, 10 - 12 am GMT. Next steps towards a regional vision.

Participants will be drawn from several national programs in the ECOWAS region, including Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, Senegal and Sierra Leone. Other interested participants are welcome.

Participants also include players from CIP, the CGIAR Roots and Tubers Program, US universities from the Feed the Future Lab network, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other research partners.

CIP has been present in West Africa for some ten years. In doing so, it has joined forces with the CORAF Regional Specialization Center at the CSIR Crop Research Institute in Kumasi. This collaboration has established a regional community of practice in breeding and seed, with a focus on collaboration with Ghana, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, and more recently with Côte d'Ivoire.

However, the wider regional interest in the orange-fleshed sweet potato has become very clear, and the need for a strengthened and broader regional approach is evident. This gives rise to the current planning effort, which should build on previous efforts and identify new opportunities to harness the potential of sweet potatoes to transform and strengthen regional food economies.