Abstract:
Africa supports a population of over 1 billion people with over half of them depending on maize for food and
feed either directly or indirectly. Maize in Africa is affected by many stresses, both biotic and abiotic which
significantly reduce yields and eventually lead to poor production. Due to the high demand for maize in the
region, different improvement strategies have been employed in an effort to improve production. These include
conventional breeding, molecular breeding, high throughput phenotyping techniques and remote sensing-based
techniques. Conventional breeding techniques such as open pollination have been used to develop drought
avoiding maize varieties like the Kito open pollinated variety (OPV) of Tanzania and Guto OPV of Ethiopia. A
combination of conventional breeding and molecular biology techniques has led to improved breeding strategies
like the Marker Assisted Back Crossing (MABC) and Marker Assisted Recurrent Selection (MARS). These
techniques have been used to improve drought tolerance in existing inbred maize lines like the CML 247 and
CML 176. Through genetic engineering, different genes including C4-PEPC, NPK1, betA, ZmNF-YB2, cspB,
ZmPLC1 and TsVP have been cloned in maize. Transgenic maize crops expressing these genes have shown
increased tolerance to drought stress. Although there is substantial progress towards developing drought tolerant
maize, many African farmers are yet to benefit from this technology. This is due to lack of an enabling policy
framework as well as a limited financial investment in biotechnology research.
