A lot has happened since our Uganda launch conference, and we thought we would take a moment to look back on the last five years and what the network has achieved in that time.

The network began as an Africa-focused initiative but has now grown to a truly global community – more than 1600 members from 92 countries, and we have seen some amazing results from our research projects and capacity building.

CONNECTED Members can view the scientific posters of our 20 pump-prime funded research projects here.

Our most recent research work, taking place over 2022-23 involves translating six of the original 20 pump-prime funded research projects into real-world applications, leading to seven new projects. Find out more about these here.

CONNECTED has done a huge range of capacity building over the years, responding to member needs and combining the expertise of Africa and UK-based trainers, alongside funding places to pre-existing training courses to build specialist skills.

This year we have run two training courses with Biosciences for Africa (B4A-ILRI Hub), the first on Vector and Virus Diagnostics, and the second on Train-the-Trainer (which can be used to expand the reach of any training). These courses were aimed primarily at representatives of each country’s National Agricultural Research Institute or System (NARS), governmental organisations which conduct research to improve agriculture. In this way, the skills and knowledge reached dozens of researchers in up to 11 African countries.

Having enabled so much research and developed and delivered  so much training we have created a wealth of important and unique resources, useful to early career researchers, which are available to CONNECTED members on this website. These include:

Personal and career skills/knowledge development

Vector and Virus Diagnostics online training resources – a self-led course

Train the Trainer online resources – to help you develop your own course

10 webinars on plant virology and entomology topics, plus 3 on biopesticides

Conference presentations – dozens of filmed presentations on plant health topics

Useful knowledge resources and links – open access articles and video links

Outreach and communicating about your work

Plant health videos – that you can use to raise awareness of insect-spread plant viruses

Crop infographics – downloadable fact sheets on yam, cassava, sweet potato and plantain/banana

Researcher tools – for data sharing, reporting, sequence and genome analysis and more

Directories

Members directory – enabling you to find other members by country and research specialisms

Agricultural organisations directory – find organisations innovating in agriculture across the world