Healthy and Prosperous Africa through Nutritious Local African Crops and Trees

With the endorsement of the African Union, the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) has the greater integration of orphan crops into African food systems at its heart. To support this, its goal is to sequence, assemble and annotate the genomes of 101 traditional African food crops, to facilitate their genetic improvement. Once genomes have been sequenced, AOCC explores genetic diversity in depth in a ‘germplasm’ panel of each crop.

Pillars of AOCC

Nutrition is at the core of AOCC. The consortium is working to address hidden hunger, malnutrition and stunting in Africa through nutritious local food crops. Many of these crops are rich in vitamins, micronutrients, anti-oxidants and medicinal ingredients. Due to nonstandard and unimproved cultivars grown in the country side, it is possible that they vary in their nutritional compositions and thus may not help in getting the right nutrition in correct proportions. AOCC aims to make nutritious crops grown in Africa productive. For further information on nutritional contents for some of the foods please check USDA nutrition database 

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