Sowing the Future: Africa's lead common bean breeder at the Alliance

She is currently working as the global lead common bean breeder at the Alliance. This role entails supporting our bean breeding program to develop demand-driven common bean varieties starting from the product design stage to the official variety release. She facilitates the development and implementation of the common bean breeding program strategy, including coordinating the breeding team to ensure the program achieves and sustains genetic gain for key demanded traits; this also involves ensuring that the breeding pipelines are correctly aligned with target product profiles based on farmer’s preference and consumer demands and the target population of environments (TPE).

She oversees the bean breeding program vision and operations across Alliance breeding stations, including implementing improvement plans and using standard operating procedures/guidelines for effective product development. Some of her key responsibilities include engaging with the Bean Program Leader/Director of PABRA together with the research area director for Crops for Nutrition and Health and other related research areas to implement steps towards the modernization of the common bean breeding program in key breeding stages, trait discovery, breeding methodology, high throughput phenotyping, application of molecular tools, mechanization and automation of operations, testing strategies, and data analysis and interpretation.