It is my pleasure to welcome you all on behalf of the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), a Network of 129 universities in 38 African countries to the 13th in Series of the RUFORUM Webinars.

For those who may not be familiar with RUFORUM, we were founded in 2004 by 10 universities in Eastern and Southern Africa to transform African universities to collaboratively train critical thinkers, innovative and entrepreneurial graduates to address Africa’s agricultural challenges. RUFORUM was also founded to mobilise African researchers to generate knowledge, technologies and innovations that are relevant in addressing Africa’s agricultural development challenges and reaching out to communities to solve these challenges.

RUFORUM recognizes that African universities cannot achieve this objective alone and need partnerships with universities and other actors within and beyond Africa. Indeed the two documentaries shown earlier as part of this Webinar show the value of partnership in addressing common challenges, increasing access to quality education and infrastructure and for fostering better global understanding. This is what motivated RUFORUM to convene this Webinar. The RUFORUM Network has already benefitted from partnership with the different institutions that many of the panelists and participants represent. We thank them for accepting to work with RUFORUM.

As shown by COVID-19 and Climate Change, no one country or continent can address the challenges that humanity faces alone, highlighting the need for global collective action in sharing of knowledge, technology, infrastructure, human and financial resources for helping each other address challenges.
This need is even more pressing upon universities who are established to be producers of human resources with the highest skills and knowledge to generate solutions to humanities challenges and even much more in agriculture, the sector providing food, employment and livelihood for majority of people.

It is my hope that this Webinar will provide insights for training quality human resources, research, innovation and entrepreneurship capacity development and for addressing the most pressing needs of our time such as climate change and COVID-19 so that we can produce enough quality food while maintaining our planet healthy, productive and habitable.

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