 Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everyone, from where you are. And thank you to each of you. Thank you to each and every one of you for taking time to be here with us today to exchange on animal genetic resources. I'm from Africa and they are barbanking using the stem cells approach the steps and technologies. I have Christian Cambo-Chambo from the Center for Tropical Lastic Genetic Resource based in Nairobi, in Kenya. And I'm convening this webinar with Esadu on Tevene from the Tropical Voltrogenetic Solution at Iori, Ethiopia, and Musa Assam from Rosling Institute at University of Edinburgh in the UK. And today we have a wonderful line of speakers. We have Paul Butcher from FAO, Mary Mary Bole Karuki from Auaiba, Adebabe Kebede from the Ichiotia Amara Regional Agricultural Research Institute. We have Dr. Sam Wupu from Caliwok, Dr. also Ronald Gugonsa from Makere, John Hu from Rosling Institute, and Tom Bowden also from Rosling Institute. And at the end we have Afe who will be talking to us about the compliance when moving genetic material. So as a structure of this webinar today, after the first presentation by our multilateral, original partners FAO and Auaiba, we will have the first sessions of Q&A, just five minutes. Then we move to the second aspects of the talk with our national partners from Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Then we move to the second and third session of Q&A. After the presentation from the partners from technologies, this is John Hu and Tom Bowden, who should be talking about the stem cells, and Afe Karemba who should be talking about compliance when moving the genetic material. Please feel free to use the chat box to introduce yourself and your institutions and share with others and the Q&A box also to text your questions. And the webinar today will be recorded and made available to us and through our different permutation platforms and with partners institutions also. So before we start, allow me just to introduce to you to give you a bit of background presentation. Yes, as background we know that Africa at large and East Africa in particular is home to a rich by the waste of indigenous animal genetic resources, which is essential for food security and poverty alleviation for millions of people in the region. This indigenous animal genetic resources possess unique adaptive traits, which include the tolerance to disease and best tolerance to each stress, feed and water source, shortage, ability to cover long distances in search of food, and then to even survive on the marginal feed among others. And these indigenous genetic resources also serve distinct use depending on the regions for socio-economical, cultural and on many other aspects in the African setting, but they are really threatened by many challenges. So, conservation of these irreplaceable genetic resources therefore become highly critical in Africa, and particularly in East Africa. And this is very important if we think Africa should continue benefiting from each diversity of an imaginary resources, especially in the face of climate change. And this could be achieved through an integrated approach, which considered both in situ and exit to conservation strategies, as well as the packages of service to support farming practices within the communities. And we know that in the recent years, the Center for Tropical Astrophysics and Genetic and Health, with the support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations and the UK, Foreign and Commonwealth and Government Office. The city of the Center for Tropical Astrophysics and Health, which is a co-creation of course between Ilri SRC and Rosling Institute, established a number of protocols and piloted them in a number of countries for conservation of an imaginary resources, especially for poultry using stem cell approach. And the deployment of this are being with support from institutions like AUILBA. And now we are trying to push it up with Propical Poultry Solution. And the originating games, African national partners like KALRO and many others, and also with the CGR Supply Initiative. And this webinar is preparatory to regional web lab bio banking trainings that will be happening in the region, aiming to present and familiarize participants with the gene banks operations with conservations and restorations of local animal genetic resources using these innovative technologies. And this is to contribute also to strengthen the capacities for conservation practices and sustainable use. So, ladies and gentlemen, we really think that we are here at the right place and the right time. And together, we can push forward this agenda, which is in line with the strategic development proposed by FAO and AUILBA. And today, our first presenter will be Dom Badam. Dom, are you there? Sorry, Paul Butcher. Paul from FAO Italy. Paul, are you there? Yes, I'm here. You hear me? Yes, I'm getting you. Thank you very much. So Paul is an animal production officer and has been working for almost more than 14 years at the FAO from Italy within the animal production and health division. And he has worked also as an outposted officer at the FAOIA division of nuclear techniques in food and agriculture at the headquarter in Vienna. And the primary activities of his work is to support countries to implement a global plan for action for animal genetic resources with particular emphasis on the conservations and on applications of biotechnologies like the stem cells and approaches that we are trying to promote. And Paul has previously worked as a research scientist in Canada, in Italy, and of course at the IE. And he has authored and co-authored more than 200 scientific publications on matters of animal genetic resources. And currently he's serving as a secretary of the Intergovernmental Technical Working Group for animal genetic resources within the commission of genetic resources for food and agriculture. So we are facing the right person today to talk about the new guidelines on calf observations and genomic catheterizations of animal genetic resources and of course domestic animal diversity information system. So please, Paul, you have the floor, you can share your screen and maybe a presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'll see if it works. Yes, wonderful. We can see it. You can put it on presentation mode. Okay. So I'll just start by thanking Christian and the rest of the organizers for inviting to speak about our new FAO guidelines for the management of animal genetic resources. I'd also like to recognize my colleagues, Rosita Baumung and Greg Wailuwa, who helped me prepare this presentation and also contributed to preparing the guidelines. So why are animal genetic resources important? Well, I'm sure most of you already know these answers, but I'll just give some background anyway. These resources are an essential part of the biological basis for world insecurity. More than one billion people rely directly on livestock for a major proportion of their livelihoods, and the livestock value chains employ your other billions of people. A diverse resource base is critical to reach FAO's goal of eradicating world hunger. The diversity of animal genetic resources allows populations to adapt to current and future environmental constraints, both due to markets or things like climate, for example. And then this diversity serves as a raw material for breeders to make genetic improvement. While individual breeds and animals are generally held privately, this diversity is an international public good, and therefore there is a logical goal for UN in the form of FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in the nation of managing this diversity. As far as the roles and responsibilities of FAO, to generalize, we collaborate with member countries to support their efforts to implement the Global Plan of Action Animal Genetic Resources. So what is this Global Plan of Action? It's the only internationally developed and adopted plan to improve the management of the world's animal genetic resources. There's a policy document which was developed and then endorsed by the members of the FAO conference in 2007, and then reaffirmed with another resolution in 2017. The Global Plan of Action contains 23 different strategic priorities for action, which aim to address both the current and future challenges to the livestock sector. These 23 priorities are grouped into four different strategic priority areas, characterization inventory and monitoring, which is really the first step in managing animal genetic resources, sustainable use and development, conservation, which is the topic of our discussions today of course, and then the policies, institutions and capacity building, which support the actions in the other three priorities. And the other role in rules and responsibilities of FAO are monitoring the status of implementation of the Global Plan of Action, as well as monitoring the state of global animal genetic resources, which is done based on inputs from countries. We also work to raise awareness and promote animal genetic resources issues internationally. We also establish or strengthen national information sharing, research and education. To give an example of information sharing, I'll use the DATIS, the Domestic Animal Diversity Information System. DATIS is, we see the URL here, I assume these slides will be shared later. It's the web interface of the global database of livestock breeds. This includes more than, or nearly 9,000 different breeds, and over 15,000 different national breed populations. These represent 37 different species groups of traditional livestock, as well as managed bee species. DATIS allows countries to document the presence of given livestock breeds in their countries, and also their wild relatives, as well as to describe their characteristics. DATIS serves as a Convention on Biological Diversity, Clearing Health Information for Animal Genetic Resources, in order for countries to evaluate the state of this critical form of biodiversity. It is also the source of data for Sustainable Development Goal Indicators 2.51B and 2.52, which deal with with cryoconservation and in situ conservation, respectively. This slide shows some screenshots of DATIS. We can see, say, the homepage, an example of breed information, and then a demonstration of the fact that graphs can be, you know, created using the DATIS functions. As far as other roles and responsibilities, we promote international cooperation, develop partnerships. That is why we very much like to work, you know, together with Iori, an example, and with the Center for Tropical Livestock. We also work to build capacity, you know, such through training workshops, such as this one, either one we run ourselves or cooperating with collaborators, and then we provide technical support to countries. This can be done by implementing backstopping projects, developing international technical standards and protocols, and technical guidelines is what I'll be talking about the remainder of my presentation. So among the strategic priorities of the Global Plan of Action is to develop international technical standards and protocols. This is important because some countries may lack the knowledge or familiarity with the most effective and up-to-date methods and protocols for management panel and genetic resources, and also application of standardized approaches, facilitates information sharing, and evaluation of implementation across countries. FAOA, throughout the last, say, 10 years, has developed, through the cooperation of experts, a group of different technical guidance. This slide here shows the range of guidelines that we have developed in the past, and then it can be divided across the different strategic priority areas. Most of these guidelines were developed soon after the adoption of the Global Plan of Action 2007. Although most of them remain fully applicable, there are some other instances where technology advanced rapidly so that updating the guidelines has been warranted. For example, in cryoconservation or gene banking, genomics, reproductive physiology, and cryobiology technologies have advanced rapidly, as has there been a change in utilization of material with more support for the breeding of NC2 populations, not just using gene banks as some sort of repository and insurance for against breed extinction. And also in the molecular genetic characterization, there have been huge advances in genomics over the past 10 years, and also in the analytical methods for the data. Therefore, FAOA has recently developed new guidelines on these two topics. And this just shows the cover of the two guidelines, both of them are available online. So with regard to cryoconservation from 2016 to 2020, FAOA was a partner in the European Union Horizon 2020 project called IMAGE. IMAGE stands for Innovative Management and Genetic Resources. IMAGE generated numerous research results for improving cryoconservation programs. And one of the deliverables of IMAGE was an assessment of the previous FAO guidelines on cryoconservation and the proposal of contents for an updated version. Before we gathered scientists from the IMAGE partner institutions, and we coupled them with co-authors from other institutes across the world to allow a balance internationally. And then scientists from Nordic Genetic Resources Center, which was a partner in IMAGE, also served with me as co-editors. So I'll just give you an overview of the content. The chapters are somewhat arranged in chronological order if you're running a gene bank. It starts out with building a gene bank strategy. Then it goes into implementation and organization with an emphasis on quality management systems or gene banks. Then goes into choice of biological materials. Whether semen or embryos, oocytes or some other type of cell is the best based on your situation and the species. Chapter four is looking at economics of gene banking, and this is a new development. We don't look at not only the cost of gene banking, but also the returns and then some economic analyses which can be used to make an economic strategy. Chapter five is based on developing using collections and it also details how genomics can be used to help manage the diversity in a gene bank. Section six then looks at collection and crowd preservation of germ plasma tissue, and it includes different appendices, which gives step-by-step details on how these methods can be applied to different species. This includes not only livestock as I mentioned, but also honey bees. Section seven is on sanitary issues because it's important that you do not crowd preserve pathogens along with your precious genetic material. Section eight is on databases and documentation because more and more the information associated with genetic resources is almost as valuable as resources themselves. The final line is legal issues which involve the exchange of genetic material both from the original provider to the gene bank and then from the gene bank to the users. It also discusses the Nagoya protocol which we'll have detailed later today in this webinar because that's critical when resources are shared across borders. The final section is on capacity building and training and this also includes outreach with the community. With regard to Juma characterization, FAO has a long history of cooperation with international society for animal genetics, better known as ISAG. In fact, one of the standing committees within ISAG is called the ISAG FAO advisory group on animal genetic resources diversity. There are a lot of times if FAO needs some outside advice on genomics we work with members of ISAG. For example, members of this advisory group have led previous developments of FAO guidelines dating back to 30 years ago. They started with secondary guidelines and management of animal, domestic animal diversity. And then ISAG members developed recommended micro satellite markers for standardizing analyses in 2004. They also helped us to divide the last issue of guidelines based on molecular characterization of animal genetic resources in 2011. It was natural that current and past members of this advisory group served as editors for the new guidelines. And then these editors also help us choose authors for the specific topics, many of themselves being ISAG members. So just go over the content of these guidelines. It starts out with an introduction on both the history of genetic characterization and a forward looking one would be happening in the future. Then goes over the basics of preparing for a genomic characterization study and then working with the community to get your samples. The section three is based on genomic tools and examples. It looks in more detail at genome sequencing using SNP chips. Genotyping by sequencing and then also if the mutation of genomes. Section four is on applications of genomics looking at studies and such as the methods to estimate genetic variation from the population and also on analysis such as GWAS and selection signatures. In conclusion, animal genetic resources are an important public good for food security and FAO members have an intergovernmental process for assessing the management of animal genetic resources and for guiding their implementation of the global plan of action. So I advise technical assistance to countries and monitors the status of animal genetic resources. Two new guidelines on cryo conservation and genomic characterization of animal genetic resources have been recently paired with the input by international experts. The guidelines are available online with the URL you see here and as I said before, no need to copy this down as I'm sure these presentations will be shared. So that I'd like to thank you. We can move on to the next speaker and I'll be hanging around. If you have any questions for the discussion section at the end of this webinar. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much for this wonderful presentation, which is putting more light on the animal genetic resources and the work you are doing at FAO for the countries, especially those from the global side would need these tools. Thank you very much for the guidelines that we have put forward. So that's the basic protocol conservation specifically, as we see how it is structured from building the general strategy implementations, economic data and up to the capacity building and legal issue that this is important and this is really what we need from the different particularly as Africa unions are being put in place, the regional gene banks are not transforming to center of excellence of animal genetic resources in Africa. So it would be important to hear also from Mary, who should be telling or talking to us about the state of conservation of animal genetic resources. From Mary is, Mary, are you there, are you getting us? Good afternoon, Christian. Yes, I am. OK, thank you. Yes, please. Maybe I can share the screen. Yes, maybe Paul could stop sharing. So I'd like you to share. Can you share now, Mary? Yeah, I think you're still on. I cannot share, please. OK. I put. OK, now. Now it's OK. Wonderful. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Paul, and thank you, Mary. Colleagues allow me to introduce Mary. Dr. Mary Bollack-Karuki is currently the technology innovation and skill development expert at the African Union and the African Bureau for Animal Resources, A.U.I. Bar. And she studied genetics and genomics, respectively, at the University of Ghana, University of Edinburgh. And the Notre Dame, where she obtained her PhD. And Mary is currently providing strategic leadership and direction, a scaling of development and optic of inclusive innovations and technologies, especially animal biotechnology and digital applications that will address various large-stock food system challenges and targets and targeted vulnerable communities in across Africa. And Mary is also currently leading the promotion of conservation and sustainable digitalization of animatic resources. And she is the one coordinating the operationalization of African Union Animal Resource Center of Excellence across Africa. And prior, before joining A.U.I. Bar, Mary has worked with Illinois and also with ECP, where she contributed greatly to generating knowledge and information for various stakeholders and many countries in Africa, almost all countries, as we say, in Africa have benefited from her support and management. So please, Mary, you have the floor to make your presentation. And just let the participant know that now the chat is enabled to introduce yourself and your institutions and the Q&A to text your questions. Thank you. Mary, you have the floor. Thank you, Christian. I appreciate the introduction. And I just want to say good afternoon and good morning to all those who have managed to join us in this webinar. So allow me to just take you through what you've basically talked about conservation. And for me today, my main, sorry, I'm having a challenge with Christian. Yes, you can share it. Yes, you can share your screen again. You just stop sharing it. Yeah. Yes, you can see it. You can see it. But it's unfortunate it is not moving forward. Because I did share it with you, so you can also share it. Can you just take over the control of the thing, Mary, if you can? Of which thing? Of this room session. Sorry, I think maybe that's why you can't. Let me see where you are. All right. Can you put it on presentation mode again? There we go. And it still doesn't move? No, it is moving. Thank you very much. OK. All right. Thank you so much, Musa, for that. So I'll just focus mainly on what we have done as AUI. And this is mainly to just share with you a report on the establishment of the five regional gene banks on conservation and utilization of animal resources as well as bring in some insights on the endorsement of these centers to becoming African Union animal seed centers of excellence. OK. We are back to the same problem. Sorry. No, what's happening? All right. What's happening? I don't know what's going on. And so in that state, can you move the next slide without going to the presentation mode? Yes. When I get off and on, I can. OK, let's give it a try. If it doesn't work, I'll ask Christian to put it on his screen and then I can move on. My apologies to the participants. I don't know what is going on on my end. So just a brief introduction. And I think Paul has already raised that. And I'll just go quickly through this, that Africa is a livestock-rich continent which represents a third of the livestock population. So definitely, matters are pertaining livestock are critical to the African population. We can see that almost 3.3 million people depend on livestock in Africa and that the products are rich sources of protein. So it is very critical for us to push forward in terms of transforming the continent and as well as achieving the issues in terms of the Malabo Declaration and the Agenda 2063 aspirations. So looking at the genetic resources in Africa, we have a total number. This is based on a publication that A.U.I. but did in the year of 2019. We have a total number of breeds of 200, 2250. And I just tried to put a graph together just to show you the, you know, of the big five, what is really there we have in Kettle. Sheep, 363 breeds, goats, 289 breeds. Peaks of 146 breeds, poultry, two, 329. So in total, we also have 431 emerging or non-conventional species. This is a publication that we shared nationally and also continentally and regionally. It is also available on our websites. So what is the status in Africa in terms of the populations? This is based on the far resource of 2021. And we can see that really in Africa, we have around 27 breeds that are at risk, not at risk, 67 unknown, 719. And this is something that needs to really draw our attention. If you look at the total number of those that are also non-regionally at 75, internationally 69. So we really are working with our populations that we don't know their status in terms of risk, whether they are endangered or threatened. And in total, we have a total of 36 mammalian and three avian breeds that have been reported as extinct. So this shows the number of animogenetic resources that we have. And sorry, this, can you see? Yeah, we can still, I think. Still moving, yeah. Yeah, it's moving if you go out of the presentation mode. Okay, there we go. Yeah, I'm having, I think when I get off and back is when it comes back. All right, so we are really looking at what was really pushed forward. And these are in terms of the recommendations that were made. And during the ninth conference of African ministers in 2013, it was recommended that animal resources need to be conserved. We need to look at the sustainable utilization of animal genetic resources. And especially those that are adopted to local conditions. And this is really in relation to the fact that we need to look at local breeds that are well suited to our African production systems so that we don't have to put in a lot of resources in terms of production. Especially when we bring in exotic breeds which adds more pressure, production pressure to the farmers. So Lidesa was developed. And in the Lidesa strategy, in the strategy 6224, we were asked to design and implement innovative and sustainable breeding and conservation programs at national and regional level. And this is why we brought forward to the ministers the agenda, the actions that we had to do. Also in strategy 6.27, we were asked to create an enabling environment to institutionalize and generate incentives for enhancing livestock ecosystem services, including biodiversity service. So yet again, the issue of conservation was pushed forward. Now, the Malabo declaration really stretched the significance of conservation as a sort of a use of natural resources. And this is something that has continued to push the actions for Africa. In the recent agenda, 2063, the first aspiration is really based on inclusive growth and sustainable development and also pushes for biodiversity conservation. Under the global plan of action of FAO, again, it has highlighted in the GPA, the need for conservation of animal genetic resources and also the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals calls again for conservation and risk status. So with this put on the, pushing our agenda forward through the genetics project, we were able to come up with establishment of five regional gene banks for CRIO conservation. And mainly what was the agenda was to support countries with national, without national genetic gene banks to access CRIO conservation facilities as well as provide a backup storage, provide storage of genetic materials for trans-boundary breeds, as well as drive an agenda of promoting utilization of unique adaptive traits, which are very well exhibited in our indigenous breeds. This includes drought tolerance, disease tolerance, you know, feed and what is able to survive in very harsh conditions, resilience, which are critical to climate change. So through the genetics project, we established five regional gene banks. We have one that is in Southern Africa region, hosted in Botswana at the Department of Agriculture Research DAH in Gaberone. The West African region has the regional gene bank hosted in Nipina Faso, Arsirdes in Bobodialaso. Central Africa region, the University of Chang in Gaberone hosts the gene bank. Northern Africa region, Tunisia hosts the gene bank at the Bank National Region in Tunis. The Eastern African region hosts our gene bank in Niagara, in Entebbe, Uganda. So we came up with various documentation that were necessary to drive the regional gene banks. And one of the most important one was the memorandum of understanding. This was reviewed and it was agreed. And it was something that was meant to be signed by member states. The sub-regional focal points, the REC and AU IBA. Then we have the standard operating procedures which are also available for collecting handling and storage as well as processing. Legal and administrative guidelines for the movement of animal genetic resources as well as a material transfer agreement that was cleared by the African Union Office of the Legal Council. So as we put all these things in place, I must highlight that we faced a bit of challenges in the operationalization of the regional gene banks and therefore it was, we bore the need to try and change these regional gene banks to become centers of excellence and widen their mandate so that we could have member states and all the RECs involved as to become part of the sort of driving the agenda on conservation on the continent. So the first main mandate was to support, development and implementation of continental conservation programs. So moving away from just storing genetic material but rather getting practical, building not only infrastructural capacity but also technical capacity. So we wanted also to look at the development and implementation of prior conservation strategies for animal genetic resources. We had already started on this but we also faced a bit of hiccups because of again, technical incapacities. Then training of stakeholders to develop and adopt innovative technologies. And I've seen Paul has shared a publication on that. This is something that really needs to be shared widely and adopted to drive the agenda in terms of building technical capacities. Then promote inter and intra regional sharing of genetic material, promote sharing of best practices and lessons learned and then push the agenda in terms of biotechnology. The first one was drive the agenda of the adoption of continental guidelines for the harmonization of seed regulatory frameworks. Also the agenda on continental guidelines on the use of biotechnology as well as presenting ourselves as a platform for advocacy and awareness creation on sustainable utilization of local grid genetics. And this is something that is very critical. So during this fourth steering committee the ministers were really supportive of what we had proposed. And at the end of the meeting they endorsed our proposition. So they took note of the reports on the selection process of the five regional gene banks as regional gene banks, endorsed the recommendations of the reports on the selection of the five regional gene banks. So it's important for me to highlight that these were actually assessed before we pushed them forward to become regional gene banks. They were first national gene banks. The ministers also endorsed the five regional gene banks as African Union Animal Resources Seed Centers of Excellence. The ministers also urged the African Union Commission in collaboration with the RECS to support the apparelization and sustenance of the five African Union Animal Resources Seed Centers of Excellence as well as called upon the African Commission to support the establishment of a continental backup center at AU Panva. So we now have a continental backup center that will store all the genetic material that will be collected across the regions. They also requested the AU Commission to support the adoption of the continental guidelines for the harmonization of the seed regulatory frameworks. They also requested the African Union Commission to support the adoption of the continental guidelines for biotechnology. And I think this is something that we will need to come back and talk about because the continental guidelines were very, very biased towards the crop sector. And the livestock sector really needs to be included in these guidelines to push our agenda forward in relation to the use of biotechnology. They also requested the African Union Commission to mobilize resources for the operationalization of these seed centers of excellence as well as a backup for continental gene bank. So what are the ongoing actions in relation to this after they were endorsed of the African Union Seed Centers of Excellence? We were able to establish continental technical working group to support the operationalization of this. And it is through this group that we were able to initiate various actions. We initiated the assessment and development of a continental strategy which is actually hopefully going to commence by this month. We also signed an MOU with ASARECA to provide guidance on the signing of the East African MOU. During the continental meeting that we held, we were able to also develop a guiding framework for the operationalization. And you can see it's a bit faint, but that's basically the organogram of the African Union Animal Resources Seed Centers of Excellence. We start with the farm associations, research organizations. We move to the national focal points and ministries, the agencies that is basically where the center is hosted. Then we move to the AUC, AU African Union Seed Centers of Excellence and the sub-regional focal points. This is where ASARECA, CARDESA, INRA come in. Then we have the REX, the Lifestock Technical Committees, Council of Ministers and AUI overall. We also develop an assessment criteria for evaluation of the African Union Animal Centers of Excellence. This I can share with you because I had a short time, but there is an assessment criteria which is what we are using to assess what we have to identify the gaps that we need to cover in terms of infrastructure capacity, biosecurity, human capacities, capacities for training so that we can really action these things that we are talking about that still remain abstract but need to be made come to reality. We also have the development of an action plan for the operational of these national content sources. So we've also come up with something that I need to mention here. We were also, for the first time, we were able to push an agenda for the CARDAP, Lifestock Seed Indicators. For the first time in the bionnual review for the agricultural program for AUC, we are going to be able to assess the degree of usage of local indigenous seed across the continent. So what we are looking at is really trying to see what is the percentage of local genetic material that is used vis-a-vis the exotic material and try to come up with a way to see whether we can get to a 5% increase in terms of the generational intervals. So this is something that is in the pipeline. This is the first time it has been integrated as an indicator and we are looking forward to being able to push the agenda of conservation because now we will be able to say, this is the degree of usage of local genetic material. We need to conserve it, we need to preserve it, we need to sustainably utilize it. So in terms of resource mobilization, we've been moving forward with our agenda and there has been some commendable actions in relation to that supporting to the African seed centers, even looking at it in terms of one health actions. And it is our hope that through these interventions, conservation and preservation of our local breeds is going to be pushed at a higher level. Not forgetting that at national level, the gene banks are still weak, so we need to strengthen our national gene banks and we push forward to the regional level and eventually to the continental level. I want to thank you so much for your kind attention and asante nisana, merci, obrigado, shukran. Thank you. Thank you, thank you so much Mary for your wonderful presentation. And I'm sure it is giving more confidence to the regional stakeholders of the unimaginative resources in the region, that with you, with AUI back and with the inclusions of the activities for the bio banking of unimaginative resources in Africa into the cadet and the leadership assigned to Azareka, we should be able to transform to make a big transformation on the ground and to make sure that the use of locally adapted seeds and certified seeds are also well captured on the ground. So thank you very much Mary and Paul for this first session of the presentation. Now for the Q&A, is there any questions? Mosta, can you see any question here? I can see a hand from the Rosalie. Let me have a second. Just give me a second to see if there is any question in the chart. Not that I can see, unless someone, I can't see a hand, can you see a hand, you said. I think maybe it was just a mistake from Rosalie. Yeah. I think what I would want just to set it off back to Mary, the resource mobilization, but do you mind elaborating on that? What do you mean by resource mobilization in the context of conservation? Like what does AUI exactly mean when they discuss resource mobilization? Thank you so much, Mosta. So basically what we were looking into is really to drive an agenda to create more awareness on the importance of conservation and pre-conservation, especially of local indigenous animals. And what we were doing is we have approached few development partners. And we are looking at, for example, Christian is aware of this, we are really pushing forward the establishment of a seed, animal seed industry. Try to push an agenda that speaks to the animal seed, like the crop sector has. You know, when you ask for certified seed for crops, you actually get certified seed. But when you ask for certified evaluated seed for animals, you get exotic animals presented to you. So we felt the need for Africa to push an agenda, not only to conserve, but to sustainably utilize by really building up a seed industry that will be recognized in terms of improving food and nutritional security. So that's one of the ideas, but we've had the various actions and we are still working on this. And we are hoping that once the development partners push the agenda forward, we'll be able to drive forward our actions on conservation. And not really allow me to emphasize, not conservation per se, but sustainable utilization because there's really no need of telling our farmer, please conserve this animal when it brings no monetary value to them. Thank you, Mary. Just to clarify, I see some people still on the Q and A saying the chart is disabled. I don't know if they can type their questions just in the Q and A section. Forget about the chart if you can type on there. Thanks, Mary. Christian, you have any question? Or any more questions? For my end, just to thank Mary and Paul for this wonderful beginning of our presentations and why are we waiting for the patients to come as people should be typing? We can move to the next presenter. Christian, sorry, I see a hand from Samuel Mucco from my end. Yes, sorry. Yes, Sam, please. Please, Sam. Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Mary, for that presentation. Just wondering on the MTAs, where are we? Because, for example, from Kenya, I've not heard about this conversation. Thank you. OK, thank you so much, Sam. So these MTAs were actually developed for all of us and were shared with our national animal genetic resources coordinator. I think at that time, trying to remember his name, but anyway, we shared all this with the ministries to be able to share them with you, because this was something that we hoped would be between regions, between countries, each a sea, which is a continental MTA agreement for all member states. So I will definitely share this with you, Sam, so that you can have an idea. I can even share it with more of us. I can share this with Christian, too, so that people can have more of an idea because these are the challenges we face. As long as you don't have information on these matters, then we continue to remain in the status that we are in. Even for the MOU, we face the same challenge because countries did not have access to the MOU. That's they were not sure what they are signing it to. So we can share these protocols with you, Sam, so that we can drive the agenda forward. And I think this will be important, Christian, if you allow me just to say quickly, will be important for what we are starting now. So we have pushed forward a mobile center of excellence with Samuel Mboko-Kalro and Kagric, which is going to serve the region where we are taking genetic material across the borders to the various, especially pastoralists, drive and drive the agenda of certified and evaluated locally available seed. So if we have these MTAs, then I think with the transfer agreements, it will be so much easier. And these even mobile centers can move further because our drive is to get more access to the people who need it at the grassroots level. Thank you. Christian, I don't know if there is time for just one question for Mary, then we can move on. Yeah, we can. The last question, you can see Paul Juma. There is one on the Q&A chart. So I think this is from Roslyn Mboko. I don't know if she wants to ask the question or if I just read it out. OK, just read it out so that we move quickly. So Roslyn is asking, does the EUI support national organizations when it comes to strengthening national gene banks? OK, thank you so much and greetings to Roslyn. So yes, this is actually one of the things I said at the very end of my presentation. We realize that if we strengthen the regional centers of excellence and the national gene banks remain weak, then that will be a situation that will be very tricky because we expect the national gene banks to populate the regional gene banks. So we are hoping that with these ideas I said about the seeds industry, we are going to drive an agenda of strengthening the national gene banks so that we can strengthen the regional gene banks in terms of access to genetic material. And I know Roslyn had even tried, we were hoping to support you in relation to the conservation strategy, the gene banking strategy, which FAU had trained us on. So these are some of the things that we are hoping to do to go to Kagric, to Nagric, develop gene banking strategies for them. And that way you will be a strengthened institution to now assist with supporting the regional centers of excellence. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mary. Yes, and I propose Paul Chouma type his questions on the chat, the Q&A, the removal here with the next presenter with Adebabe Kebede, Adebabe, are you there? Yes, I'm there, Christian. OK, thank you so much. Allow me to introduce you to the participants. So Dr. Adebabe Kebede is the director of the Ender Salastro Research Center and the researcher in animal breeding and genetics with more than 19 years of professional experience in Salastro research and development, mainly on chicken. And Adebabe worked on the World Genome Cardiozational Ability Chicken in Ethiopia, comprises 27 chicken populations. This was for the requirement of his PhD and he was done on the support from Illyri and the CTLJH. And besides, he was involved in designing strategies for the conservation of and improvement of livestock in the Amara region in Ethiopia, while also serving as a member of the Technical Advisory Committee for livestock, fish face and sector development program in that region. Please, Adebabe, you have the floor to talk to in light of local originating resources in the regions and their conservation status. OK, thank you for the opportunity. Thank you, Christian, you and your team, because I've got the opportunity to talk after two senior members from Africa Union and from FAO. And I was also actually very grateful and privileged to hear their talks. So, having said this, I think I have been given this title actually on a local political genetic resource in East Africa and their conservation status. So I used the literature from different sources from web sources and tried to at least capture as much information as possible regarding all these countries or East African countries. So this is my outline. Actually, I will go through the introduction and the current indigenous chicken population in East Africa challenge the conservation status of IC indigenous chicken in East Africa. And what is why are we pressed or what is the need for conservation will be highlighted. And finally, I will have a kind of conclusion and the way forward. So many sources actually tell East Africa mainly depend, East African community depend on agriculture for employment and livelihood opportunity. And the livestock sector, including the poultry sector, is part of the agricultural sector that contributes tremendously about 20 to 30 percent of the national GDP. In East Africa, we over 80 percent of the human population, they are actually reported to live in rural areas of which 75 percent of them keep household, keep indigenous chickens. When it comes to the importance of the indigenous chickens in East Africa, they are actually used for many purpose for social, cultural aspects, economic aspects. And they are actually helping the rural community. Basically, in terms of the production system, most of the IC are produced under an extensible village scavenging system characterized by provision of few inputs. And these days, the poultry sector in Africa is also being reported to grow. Particular is a commercial aspect because of the urbanization and the growth of the middle class in the East African subcontinent. Even the the racial village to commercial chicken is actually different from the different countries. And it is believed that the commercial poultry is increasing day by day, but the largest volume of both eggs and poultry meat is still coming from the indigenous chicken. I'm not sure if you can see the characterised ecotypes in East Africa. In Ethiopia, we have, as far as the literature reports, Ethiopia has characterised 31 ecotypes. Kenya has characterised 9. Tanzania has characterised 10. Uganda 12, Sudan and South Sudan all together has characterised 5. Rwanda 4, Somalia 5 and Eritrea has characterised 9. And these all characterisation actually depend on mainly phenotypic characterisation studies. And in some countries actually, there are some molecular aspects, micro satellite plus mitochondrial DNA studies. Regarding the poultry population in indigenous chicken proportion, Tanzania has actually the highest population or in millions, 72 millions, million heads and of which more than 56%, about 56% comprise the indigenous chicken. Ethiopia has about 57 million population and of which 79 is indigenous chicken. Before it was about 90%, but now the dissemination of exotic chicken is getting high, so it's going down. The proportion of indigenous chicken is going down. In Kenya, there are about 54 million chicken of which 75% are believed to be indigenous chicken. When you come to Uganda, they do have about 48 million chicken and 88% of it is indigenous chicken. In Malawi, we have 12 million chicken population, including the other variants of poultry and 90% of them are indigenous chicken. In Rwanda, we have about 7 million, sorry. The proportion of indigenous chicken is 4.3, sorry, it says 64 by mistake. In Eritrea, I have got a report of 1.1 million chicken and actually the report doesn't mention whether it is the total poultry or the indigenous chicken, but I believe that only a few introduction of commercial chicken is reported in one district. So I think this about 1 million is indigenous chicken. Different merits of IC are actually reported in East Africa from different literatures, which I mentioned actually. People are using the IC chicken for economic, social and cultural purpose and the meat and egg is actually preferable compared to the improved chicken. And they are believed to have unique adaptation to the local environments, including thermal stress, drought, pathogen and suboptimal nutrition. This is actually the reports about the ICs of East African countries. And ICs are actually valuable, people or reporters mentioned that ICs are value reserves of genes for adaptive and economic traits providing diversified gene pool. And the most important trait or aspect of the ICs is that they are self-sustained because they can reserve or replacement stock unlike the improved chicken. And management requirement is not as such critical as those of commercial chickens and their product is believed to fetch more money than those from exude breed. So most of the reports actually appraise for these good traits of indigenous chicken, but still they have reported the challenges of IC in East Africa for their growth rates and they are believed to produce yours more size eggs and comparatively little meat. People also keep them without commercial intentions and they have been neglected actually by readers and scientists despite some good characteristics and attributes of the IC. Overall, the poor productivity of bird is a shortage and poor quality of feeds consumed by village chickens, frequent these outbreaks and inappropriate housing are actually being reported as main constraints of the East African IC chicken. The other most important challenge is the gradual erosion of the genetic diversity of the stocks through cross breeding and upgrading programs. A case in point is in Tanzania, commercial poultry production is increasing and in Kenya, the same is true. Many genetic improvement programs have been started through cross breeding as well as just dissemination of improved poultry strains is becoming a very quite common phenomenon. The same is true for Ethiopia and Uganda. For instance, in Uganda, you can have a number of exotic breeds like Rhode Island, Habart, Arbor, Acre, Cyborg, Bovans Brown, Bovans Gold Line and other strains are being disseminated. So this is actually putting the indigenous chicken in danger. Many reports have highlighted the indesimilar distribution or dissemination of exotic chimps in East Africa and several local chickens have been classified into breeds or exotic types, but many remain unidentified and are facing extinction. These are actually the vivid reports from different sources. And there is no structure of breeding policies and breeding strategy and breeding program and the focus for the IC genetic resource is quite limited in these countries. When it comes to the conservation status of IC in Africa, different literature stated that there has to be literally for to conserve the local chicken breeds or lions and only few attempts have been done here in East part of the continent. Just to see some breeding programs in the different countries we have seen in Kenya where we only noted from the literature, I only noted that there is only one breeding program which is actually set up in the National Research Institute at Naibahia, Naupuru County by Gertan University and it's almost, if I'm not mistaken, about sixth generation. And also actually this breeding program has been started by collecting eggs from different agroecological regions and of Kakamega, Bondu, Narok, West Pakot, Bomet and some other regions. When we see the breeding programs in Tanzania, I think we have one breeding program which is jointly established by Tanzania Livestock Research Institute and ILRI. This is actually selective breeding, targeting on Horasi chicken and it has been initiated in 2018. This is basically located at Taliri, mainly in Matawa region, southern part of Tanzania. So this is actually the loop of the, or the phenotypic or the morphological aspect of Horasi chicken in Tanzania. When we come to the breeding programs in Ethiopia, we have two breeding programs running currently. One is the Horo breeding program which engages or employs Horo chicken ecotype and this has been exercised by Debreze Italicultural Research Center which is closest to Addis, 45 km and now the breeding improvement is at the stage of 11th generation. The other is the breeding program that targets Tilly ecotype which is on northwestern part of Ethiopia in Amara region and it's about 22 km from the regional capital of Bahrain. So Tilly is an ecotype, it's second generation and it is running in my center called Andasa Livestock Research Center in association with Ilri, with the support of Ilri. So this is Tilly ecotype, actually under the selection at Andasa Livestock Research Center station. This is what the flow we have there. Basically just to show you my PhD output, in my PhD work we have tried to characterize 27 populations using genome sequencing called genome sequencing. So this was actually the output from the principal component analysis which brings the different clusters from the 27 populations. Regarding the breeding programs in Uganda and Mozambique reports from WAVE show there is a marker assisted breeding program on map chicken and with the partnership with the University of Uruguay and actually supported by Kaima Foundation. This has been started in 2019 and is actually running by two countries, Mozambique and Uganda. And I have seen that it has been also supported by the African Union and the European Commission. So most of the literatures emphasize that there is a pressing need for conservation because indigenous chicken are actually heat tolerant and the global temperature is expected to increase. They do have a very good adaptation to nutrition. Parasite tolerance, distance and tolerance characters of the indigenous chicken is very important. So because of the rapidly increasing demand for poultry across East Africa the contribution of commercial chickens is growing. So this means the indigenous chicken will dwindle year by year. So I think there has to be a strategy to conserve these indigenous populations. And factors actually show that the material to poultry genetic source are maintained in situ in living populations but sometimes in situ conservation of poultry genetic resources may not be reliable for the risk of these outbreaks. So and also in breeding as well as crossbreeding with different strains. So we have to go through different conservation aspects basically people recommend different conservation practices like conservation in the form of OVA or embryo preservation of genetic information in the form of DNA using blood either in the form of blood, tissue and DNA and they advise conservation of live populations. The other one which is actually an advanced approach is the bio bio-aging which involves the pre-mortem term sales. So I think this is basically developed by the Ilri and CTJ LESH team in Roslin. So people are actually advising this technique for reliable conservation of animal genetic resources. So far a few germ lines are being preserved for Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia at Ilri gym bank in Nairobi. Finally as a conclusion, extensive regarding the reports from literature we have noted that extensive characterization is not exhaustively done. They are mainly focusing on phenotypic micro-satellite and mitochondrial DNA. So in this case there are many strains that have been uncharacterized except that 27 populations have been characterized by whole genome sequence with the support of CTJ LESH and Ilri. The other population is the hygienic diversity makes the indigenous chicken population suitable for future genetic improvement and utilization under a range of ecologies. People are also advising advanced conservation techniques for IC is required such as bio-banking is required. And many people also suggest that just to avoid the dilution of the indigenous genetic resource there is a two-day limit exotic chicken distribution area in East African countries by avoiding the discrimination and have other dissemination of chicken. And just noting the literature search Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania has diverse indigenous chicken genotypes compared to the other East African countries. So this is what I have. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much for giving us all these figures and raising the importance of indigenous chicken in the regions per country. And yes, we are there and exactly CTJ LESH, Ilri and their colleagues from Rosalene City will be supporting on the bio-banking and we will really be interested to continue working with you and ensure that we can preserve what is the one of the main asset for the forest family, the forest families in the regions. So that is important. Please keep recording, keeping your participant, please keep texting your questions in the Q&A while we are moving to the next presenter. We should be Dr. Sam, Samran Boku. Sam, are you there? Yes. Sam is muted. Yes. Okay. Yes, Christian. Okay. Thank you very much, Sam. So Dr. Samran Boku is a senior researcher and scientist at Kenya Agricultural and Natural Research Organization, with Kando and his quantitative geneticists with many years experience in design and implementation of the last organic program. And he has special focus on indigenous breed and population. And Sam has also a very good genetic improvement initiative for our last dog in Kenya and in many other countries. And he has led so many resource mobilization and research agenda for last dog in Africa. And he's also involved in numerous public-private partnership for development and upscaling of last dog technologies and innovation. He's a member of many public and private organizations here in Kenya. Mostly he's the chairman of Animal Production Society of Kenya and vice chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Management of Animal Genetic Resources and also serve as executive committee member of the All African Society of Animal Production. And Sam is a pure product on the virtue of a ghetto in Kenya. So with that expertise, and he's great to discuss with us local animal genetic resources in Africa and also their conservation status after poultry. Please, Sam, you have the floor. Thank you, Christian. Am I sharing? Yes, you are sharing, you can put it on presentation mode. Yes, good. Well, welcome colleagues. I'm going to take you through this short, very short presentation looking at the local, you know, a room in genetic resources in East Africa and talking quickly about their conservation status. These, I could have done it in maybe two days, but in the 10 minutes, I think I'm going to do my best. But generally looking at the East African region, the law agree with me that this great animal agriculture transformation and transition, which is underway as predicted globally, probably at that of the population of farmers will live farming. At that, they are not sure whether they'll continue or not. And for sure around a third will continue farming. It is today that we want to make that decision by supporting them with technologies, policies, markets, and institutions that will help them to transition. And I'm sure through this, we can tap on the 30% who are not sure what to do so that we can have 60% of farmers that are taking farming. And this is, of course, driven by the forces in which includes the demand for these products, especially when you're looking at the meat, milk, eggs, in the continent, and specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa is on the increase. And it's putting pressure on those production systems. And these, of course, demand present our farmers, our practitioners with new opportunities that will provide these products and services to sufficient scale. But for these to happen, colleagues, it means there will be sustainable utilization and therefore conservation efforts become critical if we want to increase productivity, adaptation, and the resilience of these animals and the production systems. We are looking at a continent with over 150 breeds for the indigenous type. Of course, it's more than this. But when we look at the East African region, we are talking of huge population of cattle, over 128 million indigenous cattle. We are talking of around over 210 million sheep and goats population. It's huge. But colleagues, we have not undertaken enough studies, enough work to identify the genetic distinction between these populations and the breeds. This is an area which remains largely unknown. And as much as we want to promote gene banking, we must understand this. We must provide information on these breeds, on these populations so that we are sure of what we are going to put in our gene banks. It's very critical. And that maybe comes earlier as we engage in conservation efforts. This, if we are not sure, we are going to erode our genetic resources. And this has happened through crossbreeding, systematic breed replacement initiatives, which has happened over the last years. You'll all agree with me. Farmers, practitioners, even policymakers in the continent have appetite for the exotic breeds. But they don't necessarily care about the indigenous breed, how they will maintain as we continue with crossbreeding and other practices. This is something that we need to have a conversation around. Otherwise, we are going to lose our genetic attributes, which are very essential for these populations, indigenous populations. When you are looking at the whole issue of challenges, like the drought, you know, we are talking about the parasites and so forth. Those challenges are there. And we need to maintain the indigenous population, which responds well to this. If we have to do the crossbreeding, we must have a structured way of doing this. That's a conversation that we should talk and talk and talk about it. We have been talking about it, but it seems that we are not getting the right. We need such forums, talk to our policymakers, talk to our farmers, and to show them why we need to do this and this. Having said that, colleagues, if you look at the East Africa region, we have a huge population of indigenous categories, and we have various breeds. If you look like Kenya, we have the Kenyan zebuz. We are talking about our 12 equal types of the Kenyan zebuz spread across the country. But some of these equal types, we are losing them more rapidly. And the animals that we use to produce around 8 liters, 9 liters of milk per day, they are currently producing around 2 liters, 3 liters per day. We are losing that very important genetics. And even some of the population of these zebuz are not there. If you look at the Kikuyu zebuz and so forth, that's why conservation is very key. And we must talk about it holistically. And I have consulted efforts towards maintaining these populations. We have the proved Kenyan Borat developed here in Kenya. These are very important genetic resources that are well-in-arranged ecosystems. Of course, we have the Saiwo Kato, which has been developed over the years in Kenya. And it is now transported in breed. You find it in Tanzania, you find it in Uganda, you find it in Rwanda, and now Congo. The challenge with Saiwo is their population and the genetic diversity. We are currently talking to Pakistan, we want to import some more cement so that we can widen up the gene pool and also promote conservation initiatives. These are very important, you know, Kato genetic resources that we need to look into. So that is not under threat. And of course we have a huge population of crossbreeds in this country of various shades, especially from indigenous and exotic counterparts. So if you see the space is so huge and this is just some of, you know, the breeds that are found locally. At the regional level, of course, looking at the East Africa, which has been efforts, I mean breeding and efforts of the research institute for many years, you know, we have the Angkoli in Uganda, you know, we have the Soko in Somalia, we have the Krawli Mauritius. If you look at the region, typically we have huge genetic resources and the potential of these populations. Of course, if you look at the Krawli Mauritius, the population is low. They have been relying on more on the breed from Brazil. And it's another area that we need to focus on so that we can see how we can conserve these genetic resources. Of course we are doing multiplication at scale for the Angkoli. You know, you talk of Uganda, you talk of Sudan and other South Sudan and other countries. You find that their population is not really at risk because of the numbers spread across the region. It's huge. And as you know, if you go to Northern Kenya, you know, the Ethiopia, you'll find the Burana, millions of heads, you go to Eritrea, you go to the back and the other three genotypes, you know, the Forgera in Ethiopia and the Dora in Somalia. Huge, huge, you know, population of our cattle breeds. And, you know, if you go to Congo, you'll see the Lagune, you know, the Butanas, the Kenanas of Sudan. You know, the list is long. Colleagues, you know, all the way to Sanga, which is in Burundi, Rwanda and Congo. That's why I'll say I will need two days to discuss these animals. You know, they are so huge. But basically what you see from this population, they are not really at risk because we have good numbers. What we need to focus on is not to lose specific equities, which, you know, have important attributes in the character that you need to maintain. So this is where we are in terms of the cattle population. Locally. And the huge diversity cannot overemphasize on this. But also we have different classes, especially when you are talking about the Taurin breeds. We have the herford, we have the cement, which have been here in the region for long. You know, when you look, we talk of the black and the red anchors, you know, several beef types. And also they do Papa's cattle. And also they do Papa's types. Which are domiciled in this region. And we have used them meant for many years, especially focusing on the on the cross breeding initiatives which has really structured. And these animals are now here with us and the form part of our population. Then I just wanted to show one slide on the ship as well. We have of course the dopa ship. We have the, you know, the red master ship. And we have the black headed passion ship. We have huge equal types that spread across the region. Actually the main breed in you know, I wanted to show it's dopa because some people don't know the, you know, the differences. But if you look at the tail of those two breeds, you can see the difference in terms of if you look at the fat, that was strategic for me so that we can all appreciate. So these are also in millions when you talk of the blackened passion ship may not be under threat, but it's also critical to have them, you know, talk about the issues of the conservationists as well. Of course the dopa, the dopa has been here. Farmers continue to import genetics from South Africa. It's a conversation that we need to have whether we maintain the population that we are and see how we can sustainably utilize it while conserving, you know, the genetic resources. I have put a red flag on the red master ship because, again, this is a transported breed, but it's at risk. The population has gone down. Just recently in Kenya, we were trying to do some work in support of the, supported by the AI bar, what we were calling the homecoming, the red master ship, because basically we had lost this ship but we went across the country, you know, looking for some remnants of this and we have started reconstruction of the breed. Of course, working with our colleagues from Tanzania to see where we can find it and continue to multiply and with continuous selection, you know, of the breed. That is a red flag and we need to some efforts towards conservation of this breed. Of course we have the list is long. I did go deep down and we have the men's you know, the Sudan desert the oral breed, you know Rwanda, Burun, Tanzania the long tailed ship so you can see in the region we reach a diversity is again very, very, very huge for these ship genetic resources. Colleagues, again I can talk about the goat genetic resources maybe a little day or something but basically we have the the gala goats. Gala goats are widespread you know the Somali goat in eastern Africa and we have a huge population of these genetic resources so we can say that we need to continue maintaining the in situ conservation efforts but as well we need to also look at the exetive conservation efforts in an ongoing basis. There is more African goats so much widespread again across the region and again we need to promote utilization and sustainable conservation and sustainable utilization and conservation of the genetic resources we have the short Somali goat we have the Sudanese goat the Kigezi the Tanzania and so forth the Nubian huge diversity of the goat genetic resources what we may need to do is to look at structured breeding programs and the conservation initiatives so that we may take these genetic resources for now and the future use otherwise thank you for listening. Thank you very much Sam for giving us that deep dot on the animal genetic resources in East Africa and we can see the creativity and show most of the participants here some of them should be very interested to come closer to you to see what can be done and Sam as Richard I also agree with you that when we are pushing the original agendas we also need to ensure that at the national level the conservation strategies are on place to really add value to these genetic resources preserve them for future generations thank you very much Sam and please keep tapping your questions then we move to the next presenter Professor Donald Kugonza Donald can you hear us? Yes Mr Chairman thank you so much okay thank you thank you so Kugonza is a passionate animal scientist and associate professor at the University of Mercury where he's really focusing on a special productivity through performance improvement of a wide array of several animal genetic resources. He's also Professor of Bioscience at the Chandigarh University in India and he coordinate the service learning internship program 15 years collaboration between Mercury and the University in the USA so his major interest is also conservations and performance improvement in African animal genetic resources and on that perspective he's serving in many organizations many platforms and collaboration with many partners within and across outside Africa so Kugonza is going to write on the local genetic resources in East Africa and their conservation status before we move to other questions please Kugonza you have the floor Yeah thank you so much Chair, Dr. Christian thank you so much kindly support with the access to the sharing so can you see my screen hello can you see it I think there is an issue maybe you can stop sharing and proceed to the end and start again what about now can you see it now I'm not yet seeing it but I don't know it's still loading still loading can you put the because it was sharing last time the power point on because I could see your screen but yeah so like I go out of presentation mode no I can see your screen can you go to the next slide okay yeah okay that's fine okay yeah thank you so much colleagues good evening ladies and gentlemen I don't know Kugonza has been introduced is my name and I'm glad to be talking today about local pick genetic resources in East Africa and their conservation status this presentation is made with kindness of colleagues in the region I would like to organize some colleagues from Sudan, Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya and especially in Greece in Uganda so I come from New York we've had we just celebrated a hundred years and that's one of the things we are doing in trying to preserve our environment is using electric means to power our transport so I'm talking about poke this evening and a very nice subject because I'm sure many people in the room actually enjoy this product kindly join us later this year we shall be resuming the poke expo that has become part of the national calendar where all tribes or poke are enjoyed stay tuned I think around September October I shall be inviting you so as a starting point the pig is actually an orphaned animal so you won't hear a very nice story from me but this graph which I think is part of what Dr. May represented actually shows the focus on the pig in Africa and you can see that though Africa didn't have a domestication point for pigs we do have a lot of pigs of interest unfortunately our governments have not paid the best service to them in comparison to other species and thank you so much for organizing this seminar because it also helps to air the concerns about this animal so in terms of distribution that Dr. May showed this graph but I bring it back because my interest was to show that actually the pig is actually in terms of breeds it is the least there are very few breeds and when you come to East Africa actually we are doing worst so this graph shows the distribution of breeds in Africa and if you look at pigs and you look at actually the yellow line it actually shows the pigs so we are doing badly already in terms of numbers and coupled with the focus on research, conservation and actually promoting utilization of the local pigs kind of makes it worse so within East Africa I was interested to look at the breeds and how they are distributed so you will find that again I maintain on the other species you will see that on the pigs we are putting the red line we just have so little I think it is only Rwanda and Kenya Uganda and Tanzania the others have actually not even declared whether they have particular breeds so that is part of what I am saying information is not coming through so we don't know much of the status of the pigs that we have in terms of production system there are four main production systems we have the free range system where the pigs just walk all over and as I would be telling you this has been one of the major ways how the Africans were in fever which probably should change the name now that has gone almost global it is in Asia it is in Europe is concerned so the free range system is a dominant system probably handling about half if not 60% of all the pigs in the region the East African region we have a smaller proportion of people who are able to tether their pigs so they are still exposed to all kinds of environments but at least in one place the tethering system then we have the semi-intensive some people have argued that actually it is the same intensive in permanent houses and they stay in but as I will show you in a while most of the people who use this system release their house once or twice a year and that to me qualifies them as semi-intensive because then in the time when they are out of the house then they are exposed to all kinds of challenges especially disease and then we have what some people prefer to call the industrial system the intensive the true intensive system where the animals actually stay inside for the entire life so it is within these four most of our pig farmers actually playing this is the playing field and as I said I think the last two contribute less than 20% if not five in East Africa so when Mr. Chairman and team asked me to look at this subject I decided to approach it from country level because there is a lot of uniqueness in our region so I decided to look at it from country level but I will be brief and in a way for different countries I look at different things so I started in Burundi and partly because we had the chance to engage with government on the national strategy of breeding just last year so Burundi the pig size even at the point of reporting we actually couldn't agree on one figure to put in I hope Dr. Charles is not in their own but at least we did say they could be somewhere around 450,000 though that figure is actually not in the reports so overwhelmingly the pigs in Burundi are local and they do have some imported breeds the large whites the Pietron is Ilri who has supported the introduction of Diroc actually the Diroc you see in the photograph is from the research station in Mahua it's one of the sows at Mahua then also to mention they have a very big market that is a pulling factor from DRC that's the Democratic Republic of Congo but one of the major things which you hear is all the regions of Burundi whether it's in the north or in the south in the east in Karushi people are complaining about the law on zero grazing it's not just the ruminant keepers who are complaining it is also the pig farmers that tells you the farmers interest in terms of production scale they rather free range their pigs but now it's actually not possible and that might actually mean the disappearance of the local pigs in that country so there is a photograph there which I just asked Mr.Gugu tell me the pigs in Burundi I did the same for Rwanda and that's the picture you can see so Rwanda has slightly more pigs at least the documented 1.8 million pigs this is obviously a drop in the ocean if you look at the world population of pigs 678 million and most of the pigs in Rwanda are kept by small holders one to two, three cells and very interestingly in Rwanda 80% if not more of the households actually rare pigs of the farming households so the pig is almost as dominant in households as a chicken and that comes with its problems as well as advantages so I'm just showing you here from this recent works on the challenges and opportunities in Rwanda where they are trying to assess some of the productivity parameters I just want to pick out one or two things okay so this slide actually shows you in the eastern province this is the province which has the best performance of pigs so you look at things like um number of piglets born per liter seven piglets and yet we know you need at least five piglets to meet the cost of looking after the sow if you also have a boa you actually need six and a half which actually this figure means people actually not making any money from raring pigs okay many times they are not costing they are labor they are not costing so the productivity is not good and I will not give you figures for the African countries because they are not very different if you look at the birth weight 1.9 kilograms that is partly responsible for the high mortality rates that we see in East Africa of the pigs so I will leave that when you go to southern Sudan this is not good that you don't have statistics okay but we have this information that most of the pork is actually imported from Sudan in Uganda most of the pigs there are local now when you ask for the pictures of pigs in Sudan actually you also get some human beings you just check your Google where you are seated there okay so a lot needs to be done we need to support and get that region to produce more pork it's good that they are importing a lot of pork from northern Uganda there is one farmer called Santa Clara in West Nile who actually told me she sells about 500 kgs per week to Sudan so there is a pull factor also from that direction in Tanzania they have 1.6 million pigs and then when you come to Uganda in Kenya then you have the numbers going up so Uganda has about 5 million pigs Kenya has about 3 million pigs Uganda's lot has about 1 million pigs per year Kenya about half a million pigs Uganda consumes 3.5 kgs of pork per year Uganda's other Kenyans are doing 400gs per year now I have these three graphs to show you or to show us we are producing pork but actually a lot of pork is being imported if you look here these are metric tons of pork other forms of pig meat sausages and others bacon and these figures are huge look you are looking at Kenya is importing Uganda is importing Rwanda is importing some of the products in Rwanda come from France up to today some of the products in Uganda this graph is actually Ugandan map Ugandan graph you also see that though Uganda is importing it actually is exporting but most of the pork as you can see is actually going to DRC DRC is probably 98% of what Uganda sells to the world the two bars you see there actually one is world the blue bar is world and the yellow bar is DRC also interestingly Uganda has been importing quite a lot of pure bread pigs and the aim has been really to boost the quality genetics of pigs 2017 almost more than metric tons of pigs coming in this is metric tons of live pigs for breeding we are reporting them in terms of weight 2018 almost 6,500 or 6,800 now the danger here is a lot of serious breeders have established in Uganda I will show you a map most of these people are actually losing their pigs I think the most recent 2022 there was a farm with 5,000 pigs it just ended with zero they just died out there is one farmer in Kamuli JB farms had 3,500 pigs runs a number which rotors 100 pigs per day and of those 170 are from his farm he is no longer rottering from his farm because he was hit now I am showing you here a graph I hope it can be seen this is the Nairobi pig value chain the picture I want to show here is that there are so many actors in the pig value chain that it gets muddled it's good that there are many people who are taking a cut but the danger is you have not an organized system this picture is typical for East Africa if you look at the value chain mapping in Uganda in Rwanda they have been done the picture is actually not different part of the picture I am also drawing is that there is ongoing research so I will not have separate presentation on extent of research I think about conservation so research on pigs is ongoing but you could actually say I mean supporting me hopefully that most of these efforts are not national efforts and a lot can be done so now I want to go to the pigs what type of pigs actually kept so I start here with this slide which shows us some of the wild swede populations and of interest should be what we are calling the local breeds so you see they are what we call the local black pigs the spotted pig the local built pig so these pigs are considered local breeds in much of these African countries but actually they have a very strong association with introduced exotic breeds at least a recent study I will just show a study which showed that most of these breeds actually based on either the large black these are what you call the old European breeds the large black, the Saddleback the Hampshire those are the breeds which were introduced in East Africa and they have actually been localized so when you see them weighing 30 kilograms towards maturity it doesn't really make them indigenous in any way so good we call them local because they have been indigenized and we should actually find ways of conserving them because they are all reports now showing that these are more resilient in our production systems okay so if we go to the what you call the introduced breeds the recent introduced breeds we have the cameras which shows that it produces the best pork at least the eaters say that the test panels did say cameras produce the best pork and that's because the camera is actually a composite of large white land race and duroc there is the large white which make very good mothers there is the duroc which is now a major breed in the region I think in the last five years all the countries of the region have introduced introduced it and then for Uganda we captured what they call the nougeric pig it's actually three way cross with the same composition or with the same breed make up as the camera then the other breeds in the region really breeds which have been introduced from South Africa and Denmark they are still breeds which are based on the large white the land race and the duroc plus some of the earlier what you call the earlier European breeds so you can see like here the 327 PIC 327 PIC 800 which looks like purely like a duroc I mean you can't tell them you can't tell between them just like the 327 looks like the Saddleback then you have the PIC 408 which I preferred to put together with the Petron Petron initially was a very popular breed in Central Africa Rwanda Burundi but now it is popularized in Uganda and Kenya so it is typically a pork animal I know in some of the places I think from the reports there are problems with some of the pork markets because of the kind of appearance of the cacuses but otherwise the sizes are accepted and then there is the black belt 359 these are commercial lines but which you can clearly subscribe to the foundation breeds they are to me they are selections from the mainstream lines or the foundation lines but you may not really quote me on that that is my opinion there is the Denish land race and then there are these black pigs which are breeding true in East Africa and we can't really subscribe them to any particular breed and so we need to do work on them you can see on the right that black sow after insemination with large white semen it produced its litter 100% white so there is a lot to discover about our pigs this is a shot from Brian's work where Ilri was looking at the genetic composition of the breeds of pigs in Uganda and they found the very interesting story which I just mentioned about this association with the old British breeds and the modern breeds like the Denish land race and the Cambra this is a shot from my colleague Robert he's actually collecting semen and I wanted to show this because the black pig though farmers say they love this pig when it comes to ordering semen for insemination the number is so small it's almost like 2% of all the doses of semen I want to say that the black pigs actually make very good teasers so they would just stand at the nearby U2 collect the semen great so this map shows is a map of Uganda it shows where farmers are adopting the use of artificial insemination I would say that a part of the semen actually from Uganda goes up to DRC goes to Rwanda and I think there have been some doses which have gone to western Kenya so the issue here is farmers love the local pigs but when they go into improvements nobody is thinking about the black pig very few if at all are ordering a black male or semen from a black male they are all asking for Birok they are asking for Pietron they are asking for large white Cambrian therefore for the sake of conservation of the local pig that is now indigenous we need to do something I'm showing this photograph it shows one young man Eric who has said he has inseminated one million pigs but I think he said that recently but I mean I put him at five inseminations per day for the last eight years that only makes him having inseminated 30,000 times not a million times so that is part of the situation that we have in the region so I would say that there is poor access to good quality pig genetics and that continues to be a challenge that limits productivity I've already mentioned the farmers desire in improving their pigs but that may raise issues with the conservation of what we have as the localised you know the pigs which have been rearing for over 300, 400, 500 years obviously most of the farmers don't keep males so then they have this temptation of using a communal boa and then they are always having this problem of sign fever, how to break okay and so that is the challenge okay and so we need solutions here and I hope this program that is looking at bio banking to help because of the likely erosion of the few, if you remember the slides I showed about the number of breeds in the region then one of the things I also want to mention members and colleagues is that the price of pork has actually been rising in the region I just mentioned here about Kampala but it's the same in Kenya it is the same in Rwanda and Burundi so this increased demand for pork is actually a big issue and I think breeding and I am talking about organised you know recording and evaluations need to be done obviously importing pigs you saw we are importing pigs in East Africa but the cost is very high so we really need to be mainstream breeding programs I think the picture I get from listening to Dr Mbuku is very nice you know to show what is being done with the Ruminants these are deliberate efforts and my prayer is that probably after today we pay more attention as governments to the effort of breeding pigs so this map shows some of the pig breeders we have in Uganda and you can see the picture I want to show is that they are all concentrated in the central region and so when swine fever actually hits you hear somebody has lost 3,000 the other breed has lost 5,000 the other breed has lost 2,500 you know it is that worrying so I am not sure who has to take the ghost poll that you can actually take pig breeding facility 500 kilometers 200 kilometers out of the center obviously the attraction is to be in the center because that is where the biggest demand is but then the losses that are coming with them with these outbreaks is a worrying situation ladies and gentlemen my perception is if somebody actually walks in here with a vaccine for swine fever they are going to solve the biggest problem so my wish or our wish for the East African pig industry is that this industry needs to be more competitive if it is to be sustainable whereas I am actually campaigning for the conservation of the local pigs we need to put a price tag obviously most of the people when they look at the local pigs they are looking at them for resilience to disease but the issue about production is a concern and I already alluded to that so genetic improvement needs to focus on two things so the market you can use the superior introduced but then we need to put a price to the local so that they can also compete obviously they introduced breeds as I've already mentioned they do very well until disease comes and then the loss is coming so performance should be aligned to the need of the African producers at least the East African producers and consumers okay I'm showing this map of East Africa showing the different outbreaks of African swine fever so the picture is there are so many viruses Mr. Chairman and colleagues there are over 40 publications on African swine fever in East Africa it is unprecedented that a lot of attention is looking at the outbreaks sorry Donald can I just interrupt yes are you about to finish yes I am yes so these are my last two slides so are we conserving East African local pig resources Mr. Chairman when I sent you the presentation I said no but since then I've actually changed my mind yes we actually have some efforts but maybe they are not formalized so farmers are conserving in situ but are shifting gears I think from my survey it's only RAB which has organized the program they are active conservation programs in the East African region not really quite narrow Uganda is planning to establish an H2 in vivo scheme and a Greek as well and a Greek also houses the East African region a gene bank the African set of excellence that Mary talked about in Makerere we are doing a situ in vivo with the farmers that I would say these are not really organized schemes so that's why I sustained that note up there Taleri, Naik, Kigurik Izabu when I raised this question I didn't get a comment and there is even no literature on this so I can as well say no nothing is going on is there ongoing research on characterization yes in all the countries as I've already said is there storage of by banking of pig genetic resources no the main problem with this is that pig semen has issues with cryobanking in fact 99% of the pig inseminations use fresh semen so there are issues there and therefore the question is stem cell storage the future or the next best option I think so so I say sure deal bring it on so thank you very much Mr Chairman sorry if I've taken much longer I'm very grateful to you all for listening to me and to Chandigarh University who I'm calling from in Punjab to participate in this seminar thank you okay thank you thank you very much for your wonderful presentation and I'm proposing because we have already over the time can we move to directly to the next presenters and have the last questions at the end I think so hello are you getting me I can't share my slides please please donal can you stop sharing your screen oh yeah okay so can you hear me yes so June is our next presenter and Dr. June is a research scientist at Rosling Institute where he obtained his PhD from and he hasn't yet where he opened his PhD and has brought knowledge and there is such experience in Arjan etnology and biology and he's specialized in biobanking of Arjan species using Pramod Arjan cells and in fact it is he's lab with the micromagru and the one who established this protocol of biobanking that we are exploring using the PGCs and development of the surrogate host this is a technology that we need to transfer not only to but to other laboratory resources to ensure sustainability and large scale disseminations of locally adapted prey to curb some of the challenges that was mentioned so June is going to present to us in the few minutes the potential of Pramod Arjan cells and the surrogate host technology for conservation and restoration of any marginate resources please June you have the floor thank you very much for organizing inviting me to give the presentation in East African region so my talk is about to about the biobanking the avian species the new method about that so so the coral preservation of the avian species is highly demanded because they have several end users including commercial breeders and also need to preserve the local chicken breed and also hundreds of the research lines in the research facility need to preserve the valuable chicken lines as well so we hope based on the knowledge and the skills we learn from the coral preservation the chickens will extend this knowledge and techniques to the wild birds because most of the birds are endangered so at the moment the popular and the easy way to conservation of the chicken breeds it just keeps a livestock so it keeps a livestock because freeze down the eggs is very difficult it's so big difficult freeze down the semen samples for a short while is okay but for a long term it's still problematic so we can see this is a picture before the freezing we can see the semen samples there are a few dead cells labeled here in red after freezing we saw the semen samples we see more dead cells appear in the semen samples so that's a freezing process damaged the semen sperms so here is show one experiment we try to freeze down dozens of in Berlin at the Roslin chicken facility we can see here after freezing so cycle some line have a good fertility reach to 50% but some is very low 5 to 6% even lower to 0% if we freeze down the semen we may never get this line back another problem is if we use a frozen semen to bring back the chicken breed that may need 10 generations to bring a pure line, 99% of the pure chicken line that almost take 5 years so the car preservation of the gonadal primordial germ cells is a new method for the bio-backing avian species so what is a primordial germ cell is a progenitor cell they will develop into the eggs in female and develop into sperm in the male so in the chicken when the fertile eggs jacely the PGCs present in the blasted derm already a blasted disk already when the embryo developed so the PGCs is migrate to the germ no crescent here this is a picture shows the germ cells that is from PGC reporter transgenic embryo we can see here GFP labeled PGCs they concentrate as germ no crescent region so and then when the blood system is formed and the PGC enters the blood system and migrate along the blood circulation sorry no oh sorry I want to show them here is a movie we can see the cells migrate inside the blood system that is a green PGC is migrate along the blood circulation and then eventually they will reach to their destination and then the home there and then the proliferate expanding the cell number we can see when the embryo grow older here is a D5 and D7 we can see more green cells expanded the number is grows currently gets chicken PGC is common method is from blasto-disk or from circulation circulating blood the question the problem is the material from this tissues the cell number is very low so we have to expand the cell number and grow them in a defined medium and then when the cell number reach to effective number and then we can freeze down the cells and then when we want to bring back the frozen chicken line and then we can inject the cells into a sterile host this is a sterile host because we call that the sterile host because they are in Dutch PGC's ablated so the offspring from them there will be 100% from the donor cells however because this method need culture the cells so that they need a defined medium so that will bring up the cost and also you need the facility to culture the cells and also you might introduce genetic mutation so as I mentioned earlier we want to find a easy way to preserve the chickens so as I mentioned earlier older embryos their gonads has 10,000 PGC's already if we just direct freeze down this gonad tissue so that will be easy and low cost techniques and then because we didn't culture so that's the genetic mutation will be low and also we can mix multiple genotype tissue in one carotubes and then that will be increases a genotype in the carotubes and when we want to bring back the frozen chicken line and the same way we inject the cells into the sterile host and I will give more details later and then we will get the offspring so this is our strategy in details so we use GIP or RFP transgenic embryos because there are ubiquitous express the GIP and RFP in every cell types so we choose the embryo at day 9 because at this stage the embryo sex can be differentiated by the gonad morphology so we can dissect each sex of the gonad and then pull them into separate tubes and here we freeze down five GFPs plus one RFP we won't try to see whether or not these are low abundant RFP cells will transmit to their offspring and then next we need to demonstrate whether or not we can bring back the frozen chicken from these frozen tissues so for the male tissues we just dissociate the cells and then directly inject into the sterile host as I mentioned earlier at day 2.5 and for the female cells we purify the germ cells by the maxotin method and after the injection we seal the window and then leave the embryo for several days incubate the embryo for several days and then we check the gonad to see the donor cells colonization is the sterile gate host once we are happy with all of the conditions and then we hatch the injected embryos and then we raise hatching until the sex material and then breathe them and then we see the offspring by the colors either red colors or green colors to estimate the germline transmission from the donor cells here I show the videos about the micro injection techniques so we inject the donor cells through the what's that dorsal and then this embryo is about 2.5 day old and then we add the blue colors into the cell suspension just indicate is that good or bad injection because bad injection maybe will cause a leak so the injection techniques is very important because that will cause the cells the embryo's variability and also the hatchability so next I just focus this slide to show our sterile host so our sterile host we use the icarpis transgenic embryos so in this transgenic embryos so we put inducible chemicals into the embryo so the endogenous PGC will be induced apoptosis they eventually will die off and then we can see here this is original embryo without drug treatment without chemical treatment so here shows the embryos we put the drug so the chemical is completely killed in endogenous PGC so and then this slide we need to check shows the donor cell colonizing to the sterile host so because we inject we inject the GFP and RFP cells so here we can see the RFP and the RFP in red and GFP in green the cells colonize and grow and survive very well in the host in the sterile host this picture shows male cells inside the male and this slide this picture shows female cells inside the females so we can see the low abundant RFP still survive and present and grow very well in the sterile host so next we need to demonstrate whether or not the donor cells from the frozen tissues they can transmit to the offspring so I did the four separate injections so including two male tissues and two female tissues they all in the cold storage about three months or over three months so as I mentioned earlier for the males I didn't do the max 13 just directly inject the cells in the sterile host for the female before the injection purifies the cells here shows the cell numbers for the male cells I inject about 50 to 60,000 cells for the females inject 1000 and 1500 cells so here shows the variability of the injected embryos is very good is over 60% we are happy with the result so the hatchability except the first one as the hatchability was very low just 40% and then we improve the incubation conditions and then the hatchability increased dramatically is over 70% that look very good and then we grow the hatchlings until the sex material and then we breathe them and then we breathe as the male founders with the female founders so by this way we will direct produce the pure offspring from this breeding program so here show some some data from the breeding pains we can say one female breeding pains the egg productivity is 6.3 per hand per week another is 5 maximum there are 7 eggs per hand per week so this number is very close to the original original breed so and also we check the embryos fertility we can say as very good one pain is 80% another 98% we didn't see any leakage from the endogenous PGC so and then we also hatched one batch of the eggs we hatched 60 eggs and then that eggs 90% fertility and the hatchability is 91% again we didn't see any leakage from the endogenous PGC so here just show the offspring this is the embryo green red green and yellow yellow means the genes come from both parents and hatchlings are very healthy we can see here so use this method we also check we also test on the two different research line including embryo line N red light here this is chickens here is surrogate parents they are the brown feather colored so their offspring is the white feather colored they look very similar to their natural sister and brothers they are also white feathers here is light sussex their parents surrogate parents is brown feather colored and last offspring is they have the neck feather pattern is blue is very unique they are look very similar to their natural brothers sister from the natural parents so use this method we start to preserve the rosaline research lines including line embryo lines and last one is the brown red and G9 and also other research transgenic chicken line so our story have been reported in the O3 world and also our data published in the in life if you are interested and you can go back to see these papers my last slide I just want to thank especially Sanu and Mike they teach me a lot of techniques so and I also want to thank all the founders including the CTLGH so the initiates this study at the beginning and currently I support by the NC3Rs so thank you for your attention thank you thank you so much June for the wonderful presentation and yes we many people have questions of course we should record them and we should be able to go back to you but this is what we really need to extend to East Africa and ensure that we conserve genetic resources from the regions that are populated what is almost missing now so normally we have Tom who is supposed to be the next presenter but he missed his fly yesterday from the US to UK so he is traveling by now but he shares his presentation which is not so long let me allow allow me to share it with you then we go through it together I wish it on my side not yet I wish it a slide no it's visible now Christian your slide is visible Christian just go ahead are you getting it are you okay Christian I think that the slides are being shared without audio so many people are asking if they should be hearing something or not I think Christian is just playing the slides sorry you can hear the audio no there is no audio it's just slides streaming one after another maybe we can move to the next presenter when we are fixing these problems yeah I think it's possible and this is why we request ify a common word to present about the compliance at Ulrich good evening everyone good evening and thank you for joining us thank you for all your support to what scientists from Ulrich have been doing just to introduce you ify is an experienced head of overall responsibility for research compliance and environment and he has a very strong long history of working in the research industry as well including vaccine epidemiology molecular biology, biotechnology and cell culture and ify is a strong social service professional with her master of science focusing on occupational health and safety from Jumu Kenyatta University and she is a member of many professional associations with regard to compliance and supporting science development for many researchers across all the countries where Ulrich has been working ify you shared your presentation you can go ahead and just talk about the compliance at Ulrich thank you thank you everyone and good evening it's nice listening to all your presentation this evening it helps us from the compliance point of view to understand the science so that we are able to support on the compliance and I just want to quickly take you through the compliance process from listening to the presentations from this afternoon I could see that there is quite a bit of CBD that is the convention of biological diversity areas of compliance that may come into your research that you may need to be aware of and CBD is divided into two protocols and that is the Katohena protocol and the Nagoya protocol Katohena deals with genetically modified organisms and Nagoya deals mainly with access and benefit sharing of genetic resources so as I talk about it you will hear me talk about both of those areas but most of you will be in the area of the Nagoya protocol that is access and benefit sharing but the reason why I have made the presentation on compliance is sometimes we focus only on one area and we forget that compliance is just not one area compliance involves a whole range of other things on doing good science that makes you compliant so to go through your research in a compliant manner you have to start from internal and that is your own institution as many of you are partners at ILRI I will share the ILRI compliance process at ILRI we have our research pillars which are the research compliance committees and we have mainly three committees we have the ethics we have the animal care and use and we have the biosafety biosecurity the one that takes care of laboratory safety and then we have the external process which will involve government agencies and it's good to note that before you go anywhere you have to start from within your organization so internally what is required of you in most cases if you are doing work that involves research you will need to have what we call ethical approval of your research just your research going through scientific review and once the scientific review is done and it's been given clearance then it will go through the ethics review which is the human ethics the AIREC and then we go through iCook that is for the animal ethics and welfare and then we go through the IBC that is biosafety and biosecurity some projects may only go through human ethics if they just have they just doing questionnaires for people and some may just go through animal ethics but many of them will go through all the three compliance committees so the external process so you can start from your own internal process because when you go to the regulators in country where you carry your project they will actually ask you the internal process within your institution and it's important to note that when you go to a country for example you are applying for research compliance in Uganda they want to see authorization within Uganda so within the compliance process there is an in country research so you might find if you're working at Ilri or Roslyn or whatever institution you're working in if it's not in Uganda then you have had your institutional approval but you may need to send your institutional approval to a committee in the country for example Uganda where you are implementing your project and you will have to send it to a committee that does that approval so if you need ethics approval you will need to look for an ethics committee in that country if you need animal ethics and welfare approval you will go through an iCook in that country and if you need an IBC you will need to go through an IBC in that country so that is the first thing that we do within countries if we don't have a registration within that country and that's as Ilri there are only two countries where we are registered in Kenya and in Ethiopia so in Kenya and Ethiopia will be treated like any local research institution in those two countries the other countries we will have to work through either where we have a host country agreement with the government or we will work through our partners within that country then the second thing we do is we have to map out providers I think many of you when you're doing the research you just think about how to get your materials from the farmers come back do what you need to do in the labs and then buy a bank but for us in compliance we have to map out who are the providers of your material and the providers could be listed differently there could be state agencies so you go to a state agency like if you're picking picking the water so it had some of you talk about it most of it is under state agencies of wildlife you may be using a state agency facility like KALRO so you are using a state agency facility you may want to pick in devolved government units a lot of our governments have been devolved like in Kenya here we have the counties same as in Tanzania I see the same thing in Ethiopia in Uganda it's not totally devolved but they still have the districts and you have to ensure that you have notified up to that level then we have also private individual stroke entities some of you would like to pick your genetic resources from private individuals people who own big farms where they have conserved some of these materials for years and that is where you need to pick your material so you need to talk to those private individual stroke entities and some of the materials are held with farmer associations and this has become very popular that people form farmer associations that they use for preserving their materials and then some of the genetic materials are held in local community especially if you are going to communities which are regarded as a vulnerable communities you have to go through their local community leadership for you to get any genetic resources from them so once you've done the mapping of your providers and you are able to advise you on who these providers are and each provider will have their own regulatory framework on how to access material from them then from that then we map your users because sometimes you alone are going to ask for these materials but at the end of it when we read through your project you will be sharing those materials you will be sending some maybe to Uganda I had many of you people sharing the chat could you send us some to do this but whoever picked that material may have not included you so that is why we have to map up the users and the participants of the materials so those are partners in your project and it's so important where you know your partners you you make it clear in your proposal so that we include them then we go to the external process and the external process goes through what we call agreements for access and transfer of genetic resources because when you look at the Nagoya protocol it was quite clear that genetic resources belong to countries so there is nothing that belongs to an individual PI a genetic resource belongs to a country the intellectual property that you add to that genetic resource then that intellectual property belongs to you but the GR the genetic resources belong to countries and that is why when you are accessing genetic resources from countries you must go into agreements to access and transfer the genetic resources and the tools that I use we usually have what we call the prior informed consent and this is a document that you develop and agree on before you go and pick genetic resources is prior it is agreed on before you go to the field to pick so you enter into agreement with the people with the people you'll be collecting the genetic resource from whether it's a community an individual entity a local community you agree on a prior informed consent then as you develop a prior informed consent then you develop what we call mutually agreed terms so prior informed consent will just be a consent form which the people the people you are collecting the material from just agree to the fact that you're going to collect material from them but the mutual agreed terms now are able to outline on what terms are you collecting those material and that is usually very clear what we are seeing at the moment is there's a lot of lack of knowledge at country level so when we go into writing the mutually agreed terms is a real difficult negotiation because most countries think that when you pick the years you are going to use them as a result of money out of patterns so that is what is in the mind of a lot of the people that we negotiate mutually agreed terms with and it takes us time for them to understand that maybe even IP may not come out of it and the issue of public good which is what governs a lot of our research here at Ilri but it's something that you have to develop prior to collecting the materials then you have collaborative research agreements so here you develop an agreement because if you're collaborating with other people you have to do your collaborative research agreement and come out clear who owns what what IP goes to what what is so and so's contribution so that when you come to the issue of publication you don't have issues so if you have many partners you must agree on how things will work and then after that if you move your materials to different partners then we develop what we call the material transfer agreement most of us have had this wrong thinking that you only do an MTA when you're moving materials out of the country that is not the situation if you move material from Ilri Nairobi to Karl in Nairobi you need an MTA because you're moving material from one institution to the next in the project any time you move material you must put in a material transfer agreement to agree on what you are moving what kind of IP was on that material one where are you moving and what is the other person going to do with the material so you have to be very clear on the material transfer agreement and this goes to even moving the materials out of the country and in this case actually what happens is the people who given you the GR are tracking their material so at this point you need to be very clear what will happen to those material when they have moved from the person who collected them from the field to the next user if the user going to use the material return them to the first person who picked the material is he going to destroy them this is what we have seen when we take materials out for sequencing this was very difficult but eventually we convinced a lot of the government regulator that after sequencing maybe all they can do is just destroy the DNA and that's why you see most times most regulators don't want you to move blood they want you to move DNA because if all you need to do is do sequencing then they ask us why do you want to move blood for sequencing do the analysis for the DNA and just move out DNA so it's important for you to know as the researchers in this area that there are regulations that are coming in place and in most countries we are being asked to do the DNA on the ground and not move the whole blood sample because a lot of this knowledge is now available in most of the countries where we are doing the research or sometimes at the best they may just ask us to move to Irina you know to one center where we do the DNA and move out but they won't want us to transfer the blood to multiple partners just because they want to take care of their genetic resource and then we draft and submit so once we've gotten all these documents ready we draft them and submit for review by all parties so for the document to be signed all parties all your partners all the government regulators all the groups where you're picking your materials all these people their representatives must review and agree and then we use templates issued by government lead agencies and I just want to talk about this because I had Mary talk about African Union templates I really do not know what happens because I've had so many times of the African Union led developed templates but the truth of the matter on the ground is when we get to the countries they ask us to use their own templates a lot of countries have already developed so many of these templates including MTS PICS, MAT so in countries where they've already developed they ask you to use their own the good news is those documents don't vary much but you just find in some areas some countries are more strict than others so those require more negotiation then we organize meetings to negotiate agreements and I want to emphasize this it is very difficult to do a genetic resource agreement on email or even over the phone the first one is usually difficult once you've done the first agreement and now you know one another with the regulatory agencies in the in country then it's possible to process them on mail or by phone but the first ones that you need to enter into the first negotiation develop your first PIC develop your first mutually agreed terms develop your first MTA to move material a lot of these require meetings and what we see in countries is as much as countries have developed their regulatory framework in some countries they have never implemented that framework so when you apply you become like one of the first applicants to ask for maybe multiple users and such things that they're not used to so they ask you why must you send three countries why send to four countries just send to one country and get everything done so we you really must go in and help them understand that some of your projects are written that way that you have to send to various countries so just finally to talk about the documents generally that you will require so that you have that knowledge you need a standard proposal and research tools and when most countries when they talk of standard proposal so this is not a concept not they want a standard proposal methods research questions you know a standard proposal just like the one you do for your PhD masters that's the kind of proposal they're looking for and that's what most of the regulatory systems are looking for then they want to see your research tools if you say you'll use questionnaires where is the questionnaire so they have to see clearly or if you're using a method where is the SOP and ethics approval letter for human and or animal work so that you must give them an ethics approval letter and this letter must come from a recognized ethics committee in country so that is one thing that you must present to them and then they also need funding stroke a word letter for the project this is also another area that we've seen a lot of scientists especially those of you who run big projects struggle because you are projects and it's just one bit of the project that is working in the country so if I'm applying like I've seen a lot of your project in CT and G you're working in multiple countries and you may just have a budget for Uganda another one for Tanzania and the top here as different what they want is the funding stroke a word letter of that project and then you need to be clear and say the exact money that is going to be spent in a specific country for the project work in country so those are the things and I know sometimes we ask for these things and many of you wonder why but that is what the regulatory system and this is across the eastern African countries all of them ask for the same documents and then they want to identification document of the applicant so we have to show them your passport your ID some of them even ask us for your transcript they ask depending they would ask but they just want to show to give them identification document of the applicant a lot of it could just be if you work like for an institution that is registered or it's known then if the institution gives you a cover letter that is usually quite good then they want to see the CV of the applicant so you have to give us your CV at least a summary CV but a scientific CV because they want to find out who is this applicant are they qualified so governments are doing quite a bit of review of the work we submit to them then they want evidence of affiliation with a local institution and this is an area that we really have to work in various most of the countries I think at CGR this is we work with other affiliation institutions in country and we are able to get this affiliation letters out for you so in countries where maybe we don't have a CGR office or an early office or anybody hosting us as an institution then we have to have an affiliation with a local institution but in most of the countries now that we are running in the project we already have those affiliation so all we do is we issue this letter so we'll just issue the letter we'll draft it we already have templates it will go to the local institution there they get it and then we attach to the application and then if it's a student then you need also a letter from the university where you are registered as a student so the external process the process regulates with issuance of a research permit so the first thing that they give us is permission to do research so that is the first document that will issue us and then the approval from the authority so subject matter authority is you'll find in countries if you go like to if I give an example of Uganda Uganda the Uganda national kinds of science and technology will issue us the research permit and that the same ones will issue us the ABS permit or that the same one but you find it is my the ministry of agriculture in Uganda that will issue us a permit to work with animals so you find those are two institutions you've gone to now when you come to a country when you go to Ethiopia you will need a research permit Ethiopia right now are not quite keen on research permits they just want to see that you work with a registered local institution but you'll need approval from subject matter authority so subject matter authority in Ethiopia will be ministry of agriculture and your access permit will be issued by a topian biodiversity institute and then your export permit you will go back to ministry of agriculture so the process usually goes around many institution in Kenya it's even more complicated your permit to do research comes from national council of science and technology your subject matter authority is a department of veterinary service and then you access permit is given by national environmental authority and your export permit you go back to department of veterinary service so it takes a bit of movement across and that's why you saw in one of my slides we have to do mapping of the regulators so after you've been given your permit and you've gone to the field there is what we call your permit all your permits come with conditions one of the conditions is there is a time to your permit so you always have to check and ensure that when your permit reaches time for renewal you submit it for renewal and then there is always a condition for submission of periodic reports at the moment most countries is yearly some countries is every six months there are few that every quarter but we try to work on quarter because those are too often and then we have to notify countries before publication please note that countries don't take it nice when we publish things out there that we not notified them of that publication so that subject matter authority like if it's you're working with a livestock you need to find the department of veterinary service or ministry of agriculture where that work who is responsible in that country and make sure you have notified them and notifying them is not calling a friend on phone or writing them an email no you write an official letter to government so you address the right person in most cases is the CEO of that organization and then notify them of your publication before you actually publish and then you do a submission of the summary of your findings so as you notify them of your publication you attach a summary of your findings what did you find about the project even if you don't publish they want you to give them a summary of your findings at the end of your project thank you so in a short that is what you require for compliance and I think just to let you know that at Ilri we have the office because navigating these processes is not easy so you get in touch with us we'll be able to help you with compliance across the countries whatever you need to pick your GF thank you thank you, thank you so much Effie for these clarifications and the movement of an imaginary resources across the region and I like all the different participants and other researchers on what is really needed to be ensured to ensure that we are compliant to the ADS NACORIA protocol and to the national and international regulation so Musa will you take over if there is any question no I can't see any question here I think most of the discussions have happened for the previous talks and they've had them going on in the chat so I think most of the answers have been provided unless someone has any question for Effie any question for Effie I guess the this is probably something that Christian is one who would probably know but when it comes to the the big projects like the CTLGH one so Christian you have like one permit for the entire projects in CTLGH or do each project like those ones Effie require individual permits yeah each project because projects are different and the target or the objective are different normally they require individual period and Effie is working with us on that so she will still clarify. Effie I think you need to step in here just to clarify one thing you can get a research permit for the CTLGH project as long as you have the tools and you have the project proposal but when it comes to ABS please note if you are collecting materials you may be collecting materials across countries you need a permit for each country if you are collecting materials in one country you may be collecting them over a period of time so you may need to pick permits as you collect if it's a long project so it depends the research permit can be for the whole project but other permits are activity best so the ABS permit is activity best okay and how does the again maybe this is for people like me who don't do this bit every day but how does the ABS of the Nagoya protocol work for things like where you have to do like primordial jam cell conservation say say if someone like June was to go and take chicken embryos and the technologies using say for example can only be carried out in the Roslin but it has to bring the materials so how does that work same process just to get a research permit where are you picking it if you're picking them from Kenya you get a research permit in Kenya and then you get your ABS permit from Kenya with that we do your material transfer agreement and we move your materials to Roslin so if you are doing it in multiple countries each country will get that permit because the often thing you hear is for examples you can't move cells from Nairobi to Edinburgh for example I don't know whether that is just because of course there is a part of disease surveillance and stuff but that has nothing to do with material movement it's just if you have all the papers with cells around I think what you're talking about is the quarantine conditions and there are many ways of moving that's why we move even disease cells across so it depends there are many methods you might be asked either to make sure that it's clean cells or you carry out how do you activate how do you clean the cells you could use radiation to just make sure you don't move disease from here to there or you receive them in a containment facility so there are many ways of seeing as move cells not under CTLG but we move cells from Kenya to many countries or even our other countries where we pick material you just have to abide by the quarantine requirements and the quarantine certificates are issued by the departments of veterinary service or the chief veterinary officers according to the OIE all right okay thanks Dr. Christian yes please I have a question for who yes please I think it's an outstanding and very advanced technology actually and partially it was partially that that I try to understand but I have a question here he showed that the productivity of the indigene is a chicken from surrogate mothers is about 25 eggs I mean 6 eggs per week so is that an on-station output or did they try it from the natural environment that's a because we doing this in the research facility so that is from the breeding pen it's not from the environment so do you have the plan to try it out in the natural environment yes that's what that's actually this is the purpose of this project this project just try to establish easy low cost no tech and high throughput method try to use in the low and middle income country so that is now we have we demonstrate in the research facility environment and we now want to move to you know like Africa or Asia or somewhere they have a lot of the indigenous chicken breed they want to car preserve for a long term once you know the people found that they are very valuable trade they want to use them but still you need you know kind of live material you can bring back the chicken that's the purpose we want to do yeah okay thank you yes thank you thank you and thank you and in fact June is one of the keepers we will be working throughout the regional trainings and the effective banking so we have a lot of opportunity to see how that transfer of technologies from the lab or research should extremely moved to the national system and to the real conditions of so I don't know if there is any other question not say any coming if not guys thank you thank you so much for attending and for supporting thank you for your patience it was very interesting not wanting to stop and we are extended by more than an hour from what we plan but it's because all the topics were so interesting and we really need to keep moving forward with this agenda for the term presentation which unfortunately the volume was not coming out again and share with all of us so that we really capture that potential of promoters themselves of the pre-reportance themselves for conservations of poultry, pigs smaller minan, large minan genetic resources in Africa in general and we started last week last month with the Southeast Asia some activities should be going on there and we really need this same motivation and your expertise you are footing in the ground to ensure that the technologies are really benefiting to our end users, our farmers so thank you very much and have a nice evening nice night