Research Hubs

Regionalization to Avoid Wasteful Duplication

CORAF operates nine centers of Excellence across West Africa. They include:

The Roots and Tubers center in Ghana,
The Rice center in Mali,
The Dry cereals center in Senegal,
The Fruit and Legumes center in Burkina Faso,
The Plantain center in Côte d’Ivoire,
The Aquaculture center in Nigeria,
The Maize center in Benin,
The livestock center in Niger,
The Mangrove Rice Center in Sierra Leone.

Each is assigned a priority crop. The CORAF research hub model was born out of a challenging R&D context in which individual research centers worked in isolation with sometimes limited results.

Our model helps avoid wasteful duplication, ensures efficient use of scarce human and financial resources, and enhances economies of scale with positive regional impacts,

Abdoulaye Toure, Lead Agriculture Economist at the World Bank Group and Task Team Leader of WAAPP.

Impact

Out of the work of these centers, about 200 technologies and innovations have been released, disseminated, and adopted to improve the food systems in West Africa.

Becoming a Regional Center of Excellence

The nine National Centers of Specialization were established with an understanding that they will progressively graduate to Regional Centers of Excellence.

Two out of the nine centers have already been given the critical nod of approval to become RCoE. They include the dry cereal research hub based in Senegal and the Roots and Tuber center in Ghana. Some of the results of their work on drought-tolerant and high-yielding crop varieties are among the most outstanding in the region.

Achieving the status of Regional Center of Excellence comes with considerable opportunities. Not only does it open the doors of these centers to internationally-recognized expertise and collaboration, but it also opens up these centers to more and diverse funding possibilities with enhanced capacity to deepen research in their priority commodities,

says Dr. Abdulai Jalloh, Director of Research and Innovation at CORAF.