Research For a Food Secure Future

In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the lack of modern and high through put analytical tools coupled with limited capability to conduct comprehensive nutritional analyses, food chemistry, food safety and product development studies delays progress in many projects. Out-sourcing these analytical services is not a sustainable solution sinceit isa time-consuming exercise often associated with negative financial implications. Additionally, for fresh samples which require analysis soon after harvest, packaging them and sending them outside the country for analysis could potentially affect their integrity and ultimately the results obtained leading to erroneous conclusions being reached.For International Potato Center (CIP), these issues hindered timely progress critical to the development of processed products using orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP)as an ingredient for nutritional improvement in SSA.

Since the establishment of FANEL in 2014, our main objective is to strengthen the food and nutritional evaluation laboratory within sub-Saharan Africa, equipped with advanced analytical tools operated by knowledgeable and well-trained staff, that will in turn train fellow colleagues.An advanced lab for food safety,specializing in mycology, already existed at the Biosciences for east and central Africa (BecA) facility, on the ILRI campus in Nairobi, Kenya. There was, however, a need to expand this capacity to include nutritional evaluation, food compositional analysis, food product development,food safety analysis and post-harvest research. The nutritional research laboratory needs to operate efficiently, cost-effectively using standard operating procedures validated by international organizations and working according to international standards. The laboratory will have a strong capacity building component, bringing in scientists from National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) and graduate students from local and regional universities in partnership with the BecA ILRI Hub or CIP.