Consulting Services for strengthening the Global Crop Diversity Trust capacity to implement project activities in Africa

The Seeds for Resilience project is supported by the Federal Government of Germany (BMZ) through the German Development Bank (KfW).

Partners: 5 National Genebanks of Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia

Duration : October 2020 – May 2025

The challenge

The project aims to strengthen national seed collections (NSC) that are not part of the Plant Treaty’s Global System, recognising the complementary role of these collections outside the global system to improve the availability of diversified and climate-resilient crop varieties to farmers in least developed countries (LDCs).

The approach

The role of Rutger Persson has been to assist and facilitate the partners in strengthening their capacity to better acquire, maintain, characterise and promote the sustainable utilisation of the crop diversity conserved in genebanks.

The goal

The direct goal of this project is to strengthen selected African NSCs in their ability to fulfil their national and global responsibilities to conserve living samples of their countries’ crop diversity and enable its effective use now and in the future.

Examples of our success

Safety duplication of the germplasm conserved in their genebanks, at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV):

Voices from the field

“SUPPORT RECEIVED FROM S4R PROJECT IN NIGERIA

1. Capacity building on basic genebank operations that led to the development of seven SOPs

2. New approaches to utilization of genebank materials through Users Engagement with farmers

3. Upgrading of critical facilities to enhance quality of seeds conservation and support systems for safety duplication of important accessions in other genebanks as well as Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

4. Efficient data management for Internal and External access to relevant information on PGRFA in Nigeria genebank through GGCE and Genesys respectively.