About the Forum
What is the Forum for?
The Africa Crop Forum began in Cambridge in 2025, bringing together African and international researchers, breeders, funders and farmers around a shared challenge: building crop resilience in a changing climate. What emerged was more than a meeting. New connections, collaborations and ideas revealed a clear appetite for something bigger and longer-term.
In 2026, that momentum moves to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. The Forum places African priorities, from cassava viruses to climate resilience, at the centre of the conversation and strengthens the connections needed to turn knowledge into action. When the Forum returns to Cambridge in 2027, it will demonstrate what sustained partnerships across Africa and the wider world can achieve for smallholder farmers facing a changing climate.
How we work
African-led priorities
This forum starts from the priorities of African scientists, breeders, farmers, processors, national programmes and regional research networks. The aim is to identify climate-resilience challenges that matter in real production and food-system contexts, and to shape research around grounded, African-defined questions.
Climate-resilient crop science
The meeting will explore how crop science can respond to drought, heat, pests, diseases, soil constraints, nutrition and sustainability. Sessions will connect strong scientific questions with African crop-system challenges, from field trials and breeding pipelines to seed systems, adoption and impact.
Partnerships for impact
The event will help participants form equitable Africa–Cambridge and international collaborations with shared leadership and practical routes to impact. Through structured discussions and working sessions, teams will develop clearer research ideas, identify partners and connect emerging concepts with future funding routes.
Field realities and user needs
Participants will connect research ideas with farming systems, crop use, processing, markets, adoption, gender, youth and local institutions. Where feasible, the event may include farmer, breeder, processor or women’s collective voices, and potentially small-group visits linked to local agricultural systems.
From ideas to fundable concepts
This is a working event. Participants will be supported to move from broad ideas to clearer concept notes, with attention to objectives, partners, work packages, feasibility, user pathways and likely funding routes.
Mentoring, funding and follow-up
The event will create space for mentoring, funder engagement and follow-up proposal development. Intended outputs include emerging collaboration teams, concept notes, mentor relationships, target funding calls and a 12-month follow-up process to track proposals, awards and new collaborations.
Organising Partners
The WAVE Regional Center of Excellence (Central and West African Virus Epidemiology), founded and led by Justin Pita, is a scientific and technical platform that aims to increase food production in Central and West Africa. It aims to do so in a sustainable manner, by developing effective methods for the control and management of transboundary plant pathogens, as well as preventing the incursion of exotic plant diseases into new areas.
Justin Pita
WAVE Executive Director
Angela Eni
WAVE Deputy Director
The Crop Science Centre combines the diverse skills and expertise of researchers at the University of Cambridge and Niab, to provide an environment for research excellence with the capability to apply discoveries to crop improvement in the field. It strives to improve staple crops such as maize, wheat and rice, as well as specific crops of relevance to small-holder farmers, particularly those in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Uta Paszkowski
Crop Science Centre Director
Christian Rogers
Head of International Partnerships
Cambridge Africa is a University of Cambridge programme that supports African researchers and promotes mutually beneficial collaborations and equitable partnerships between Africa and Cambridge. The Cambridge Africa Climate Collaborative Research Fund aims to catalyse new and strengthen existing collaborations between researchers in Africa and Cambridge and support high-quality training activities. The focus of the scheme is research on climate resilience and sustainability.
The University of Cambridge Department of Plant Sciences aims to ensure that high-quality discovery science contributes to tackling fundamental challenges in Global Food Security, Growing a Sustainable Bioeconomy, and Protecting the Environment. Research aims to contribute towards enhancing production of plant derived products; reducing agricultural inputs; cutting losses from pests and pathogens; enabling resilience to environmental change; and delivering sustainable bio-diverse landscapes.
Interested in the Africa Crop Forum 2026?
The 2026 forum builds on the partnership model developed through the 2025 event in Cambridge while focusing on African-led priorities, field realities and future funding opportunities.