Rita Mumm needs no introduction. She was the first president of the National Association for Plant Breeding (NAPB), a former industry scientist turned academic trailblazer. But what she’ll share with you today isn’t just a reflection on a storied career—it’s a call to arms for a more just and nourished world.
“More than ever, our work needs to be transformative,” Mumm says. “The kind that builds capacity, not dependency.”
For the past 18 years, Mumm has been on a mission: to empower the next generation of plant breeders—not just in North America, but across Africa, where food insecurity is not a distant problem but a daily crisis. One in five people on the continent faced hunger in 2023. The problem is growing, the population is projected to quadruple this century, and the youngest victims—malnourished children—often suffer irreversible damage in their earliest days of life.
The African Dilemma: A Brain Drain, a Bottleneck, and a New Blueprint
In the early 2000s, the U.S. itself was facing a crisis. The seed industry was booming with the advent of genomics and molecular tools, yet there weren’t enough PhDs to fill open roles. Universities like the University of Illinois began revamping graduate education, and Mumm was asked to spearhead a new plant breeding center there—merging traditional breeding with modern tools like bioinformatics, genomic selection, and industry-oriented apprenticeship.
While American programs evolved, a different but no less urgent crisis was unfolding in Africa. Students would earn advanced degrees in the U.S. or Europe, but many would not return home. Infrastructure was lacking. So were data systems, genomic tools, and—perhaps most crucially—mentors.
“I was floored,” Mumm recalls, “to learn that in some African countries, a single scientist might be the only person working on their crop. Imagine carrying that burden alone.”
That knowledge galvanized Mumm’s work with the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC), a project born in 2011. AOCC’s goal was ambitious: end malnutrition in Africa by developing better crops for local diets.
But their approach broke the mold.
Instead of flying African scientists out to global powerhouses, they built up Africa’s own institutions—specifically at the University of Ghana, University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and Makerere University in Uganda. The goal wasn’t just to educate—it was to empower.
Orphan Crops, Radical Ideas
AOCC began by identifying 101 “orphan crops”—nutrient-rich species vital to African diets but overlooked by global science. These included indigenous trees and grains that thrive in local conditions but had zero genomic support. No DNA sequences. No molecular markers. No breeding pipelines.
Mumm was brought in to develop a curriculum for the African Plant Breeding Academy, based in Nairobi at the World Agroforestry Centre. The model: immersive, six-week training blocks for full-time national program scientists, combining foundational genetics with cutting-edge genomic applications.
“Some were analyzing data in Excel because they couldn’t afford a SAS license,” Mumm says. So the team taught them to use R, providing custom scripts to analyze field trials, genotype data, and more. Each participant left with a proposal tailored to their own breeding program. Many went on to win competitive grants—collectively, over $180 million in external funding has been secured by alumni to date.
These weren’t just professional development courses. They were incubators of a quiet revolution.
From Training to Transformation
Since its inception, the African Plant Breeding Academy has trained 151 plant breeders across 28 countries, spanning 125 crops. Sixty of those crops are African orphans. Collectively, these breeders have released more than 140 improved varieties and published over 665 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Their work is reshaping the agricultural landscape.
But Mumm and her team didn’t stop there.
Recognizing the importance of not just breeding new varieties but also accelerating them with modern tools, they launched a gene editing academy in 2023. Participants—PhD-level molecular biologists from across the continent—learned to use CRISPR to improve crops like banana, tackling traits like disease resistance. The training culminated with each participant designing a gene-editing project for their home institution. Follow-up mentorship helps them overcome challenges as they apply new tools in local labs.
“It’s not just about adding a trait,” Mumm says. “It’s about integrating it into a variety that farmers want to grow, that consumers want to eat, and that processors can use.”
A Movement Takes Root
Today, the African Orphan Crops Consortium has grown into a formidable network. With 46 organizational partners and dozens of funders—including Mars, AGRA, Bayer, Syngenta, and even individual philanthropists—the work continues to gain momentum. Mumm calls it a Pan-African movement to crush malnutrition, and sociologists would agree: with over 150 trained scientists sharing a unified goal and operating on a shared skillset, it qualifies as a movement in every sense.
They’ve sequenced 76 of the 101 targeted crops. They’ve formed a new professional body, the African Plant Breeders Association, modeled after the NAPB. In October, they’ll hold their fourth biennial meeting in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.
And perhaps most importantly, they’ve rewritten the script on what scientific capacity-building in Africa can look like. It’s not about top-down solutions—it’s about local knowledge, local leadership, and global solidarity.
“We’re not handing out answers,” Mumm says. “We’re helping people build the systems to find their own.”
