Participants have arrived Nigeria for the 12th West Africa Cowpea Consortium (WACC) Annual Meeting holding in Abuja.The WACC annual meeting is one of the programmes of the Kirkhouse Trust that provides a platform for dissemination of research findings, networking and sharing of experiences between scientists, and other participants working on legumes improvement especially cowpea.
The meeting is expected to bring together scientists, from West and Central Africa (Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Cameroon, Niger Republic, and Benin Republic), including the Kirkhouse Trust management team from the United Kingdom and the Trust consultants from the United States of America to examine how the project in each country has fulfilled its mission and deliverables.
The platform provides opportunity for Project principal investigators to make presentation on their research activities, initiate new one or realign their research work.
It will interest you to know that, WACC is a participatory and capacity building partnership that is designed to support cowpea improvement in West Africa through the use of molecular breeding and selection aimed at providing quality seeds for farmers to guarantee increase yeild.
As part of the week long event event the team visited trial fields of various improved varieties of cowpea worked on by the team which is domicil in the University of Agriculture Makurdi.
The meeting is holding in Nigeria for the first time since its inception in 2006.