Africa must start digitising biodiversity

A desktop computer. FILE PHOTO | NMG 

By BITANGE NDEMO

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Summary

• At a blockchain conference in Kampala last week, former Mauritius president Ameenah Firdaus Gurib-Fakim explained to a packed audience how her country is using the technology to create identity for each of her flora.
• They hope that this will help them unlock the hidden value in African Genetic assets.
• The country has established a Knowledge Exchange Platform for Bio-Resources and Local Knowledge Systems.
• The creation of genetic resources gives the country many advantages, especially when more than 5,000 species of plants are used for their medicinal properties in southern Africa.

Chances are that you have eaten many bananas in your lifetime, but there is that one particular banana whose taste really tantalised your palate. Did you bother to know its identity, that is, its unique genetics make up? If not, you are not alone. Many people rarely pay attention to our own biodiversity.

At a blockchain conference in Kampala last week, former Mauritius president Ameenah Firdaus Gurib-Fakim explained to a packed audience how her country is using the technology to create identity for each of her flora. They hope that this will help them unlock the hidden value in African Genetic assets.

The country has established a Knowledge Exchange Platform for Bio-Resources and Local Knowledge Systems. The creation of genetic resources gives the country many advantages, especially when more than 5,000 species of plants are used for their medicinal properties in southern Africa. She emphasised that more than 80 per cent of the people in the developing world depend on traditional medicine for their primary health care.

This academic turned politician told the audience that whilst 60 per cent of the drugs sold in chemists stores have one molecule from natural sources and over 25 per cent come from medicinal plants, the paradox is that in spite of such diversity, the African continent contributes only 83 of the 1,100 blockbuster drugs globally.

It is well acknowledged that many commercial products were developed through exploration of Traditional Knowledge Systems.

Although Africa still has these traditional knowledge systems, they are not well documented. In most cases, some of the knowledge remains in families as trade secrets that more often disappear with the death of the knowledge carrier.

Many countries including China and India have resorted to digitising this knowledge for posterity. Ratifying of international conventions on traditional knowledge systems is of no consequence if Africa does not document her resources and manage them well enough for the continent to benefit from the hidden treasures in our biodiversity.

In this respect, she felt that Africa should establish a platform that allows Genetic Resource users to discover new genes, bioactive compounds and target traits in previously uncharacterised Bio-resources/Biodiversity without having to access the physical genetic material.

Such a platform, she said, will become a tool for Digital Bio-prospecting, which will allow gene discovery, trait identification and bioactive compound discovery, using new approaches. In essence, this could allow plant innovation for drug/nutraceuticals development, crop production, bio-product development (such as essential oils), cosmetics and food supplement production, biofuel, and industrial production, she said. She said there is more in value addition, which entails the acquisition of innovation inputs from the physical material (relying on genetic material as information carrier) to the intangible domain (data, traits, sequence listings and compound libraries.

There is need, therefore, to leverage technologies to have young people rummage through forests to identify each and every plant, develop a database in a well-maintained platform in all African countries. There is no need of always saying that Africa has potential when we don’t even know what plant assets we have within our borders.

Yet, we keep on talking about how unemployment is becoming a problem in the continent. Well, here is an exercise that will occupy hundreds of thousands of young people to unlock the hidden values in African Genetic assets.

Africa’s economic desperation has driven her citizens into a state of paralysis so much that even the low hanging fruits in our biodiversity are not sustainably utilised and are left to into the wasteland of destruction. But technology can help us monetise the same for a sustainable future.