Scale is very much on the agenda today in Africa, though a little bit under the radar, for some reason. We’ve seen no advance publicity, for example, for the launching of the the African Plant Breeding Academy by the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC). We were insufficiently attentive, no doubt. Here’s the press release. And you can follow the proceedings live from the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi. There is also tweeting:
Cabinet Secretary Kosgei: Scientists should take advantage of the academy for improved food security #orphancrops http://t.co/ORHbRpu4wX
— CIFOR-ICRAF (@CIFOR_ICRAF) December 3, 2013
You’ll remember that the African Orphan Crops Consortium plans to use next-generation technologies to sequence dozens of heretofore neglected crops and use the resulting megadata to improve them. Good luck to them.
Meanwhile, a little further north, another CGIAR Centre is hosting a meeting of Feed the Future’s Agriculture & Nutrition Global Learning and Evidence Exchange, a meeting which is apparently focusing on scaling up technology adoption. I found out about it via the redoubtable comms people at ILRI:
@ILRI Addis today hosts @FeedtheFuture GLEE on scaling up adoption and use of agricultural technologies. http://t.co/5kuVH3UXZd@agrilinks
— peterballantyne (@peterballantyne) December 3, 2013
But further information is very scarce. Maybe a participant will fill us in. In particular, of course, we’d be very interested in what is being said about the use of agricultural biodiversity in scaling up nutrition interventions.