Leah works towards a food secure Africa

We met Leah Nandudu in 2015, when she started her Master’s degree in Plant Sciences at Wageningen University on a combined scholarship of the Paul Speijer Fund and the Anne van den Ban Fund, two scholarship funds within University Fund Wageningen. A daughter of a coffee farmer and a teacher, she was introduced to agriculture at an early age. In her home country Uganda, she had obtained a bachelor’s degree in agricultural sciences, during which she worked with vegetable farmers, and had worked on banana diseases in the department of plant breeding at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture.

After obtaining her Master’s degree in 2017, she dreamt of a PhD, but first wanted to use her knowledge in the field. ‘Why keep on accumulating knowledge without applying it,’ she said. ‘When you gain knowledge, you should give it back too.’ She was able to join the national agriculture research organization as a plant breeder in the northern part of Uganda, working on the improvement of sorghum yield. ‘Without the scholarship I would not have been able to do so. A Master’s degree is a requirement for this type of work, and my family and I would not have been able to pay my studies, neither in Uganda nor abroad.’  

In 2018 an opportunity came up on the national level within the organization, for a PhD in collaboration with Cornell. ‘Having gone to Wageningen really helped me, it put me ahead of all the other candidates, because no one had gone to a top institute.’ Her dream of a PhD-position became a reality, and the next years she split her time between Cornell and East Africa, working with farmers on a virus in cassava: the cassava brown streak virus. ‘Cassava is an important crop for food security in East Africa. It doesn’t need a lot of input, it grows on the worst part of the field, and it survives when other crops fail.’ Except when it gets infected with a virus. 

Brown streak virus causes lesions in the cassava roots and makes them inedible for both humans and animals. When the virus was discovered in the 1930s, only the cassava mosaic virus was known, and the existing plant breeding methods used for mosaic virus were also applied to the newly discovered virus. However, these methods proved to be less effective for the brown streak virus. Therefore, during her PhD, she provided additions to the methods. ‘We identified regions in the gene that trigger susceptibility to the virus, recommended those regions to validate for markers for breeders.’ She also worked on a more financially accessible test for farmers. 

After successfully defending her PhD-thesis, dr. Nandudu now works at Inari on gene-editing, often mistaken for working with GMOs. ‘With a GMO, you add a gene that is not part of the plant, but with gene editing, we just edit the sequence of the gene that is native to the plant itself. We either cut out or copy and put it in another place.’ The regulatory landscape in both Europe and Africa is still strict, but in the EU, research on gene editing is possible. ‘We try to write about the data in a way that regulators understand so we can get permits to start trials.’

Leah’s heart remains in farming and giving African farmers the knowledge and resources they need to provide for the continent. ‘Joining Inari is a way to prepare myself for the next step. If Africa is to be food secure, it needs people who understand how gene editing works and how to do it, so they can help regulators to understand, and we are not left out of global agricultural developments. In five years, I hope to return to Uganda and work with the national institute to bring in gene editing.’ 

Looking back on her time in Wageningen, she smiles: ‘I made great friends, and I have great memories. It gave me a push for my knowledge, providing a solid foundation so that I never struggled at Cornell. And the scholarship has changed my life, my family’s life, and the people around me. I can now afford the fees for the people around me. It has helped farmers, who work with sorghum, with cassava. All because of the people who helped fund my education. Thank you!’