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COORDINATING COMMITTEE | contacts
Chair Dr Alfredo Armando Manuel, Angola;
Professor Vincent Saka, Malawi;
Mr Boaventura Nuvunga, Mozambique;
Dr Eugene Marais, Namibia;
Dr Connal Eardley, ARC-PPRI;
Dr Gerhard Prinsloo, South Africa;
Mr Albert Chalabesa, Zambia;
Mrs Rudo Sithole, Zimbabwe.
Status In 1996 the Southern African Development Community (SADC) endorsed SAFRINET as an official SADC project. SAFRINET's membership thus includes all SADC countries. New members to SADC are welcome to participate in SAFRINET.
Member countries 15: Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar.
Context Taxonomy is fundamental to understanding and communicating information on the earth's biota. The management and sustainable utilization of both natural and agro-ecosystems requires the identification of species. In southern Africa all countries need capacity building in taxonomy, some more than others. SAFRINET as a SADC programme is truly sub-regional and national in its impact and designed to resolve well-defined and substantial SADC-wide problems threatening the long-term environmental sustainability of the region.
Goals and Priorities
- Develop natural control methods to reduce
and/or eliminate pest-induced losses of crops and of stored
products and thus contribute significantly to increasing
agricultural production in rural areas where most poverty is to be
found.
- Build capacity, using modern technology,
to enable SADC plant quarantine inspectors to improve their
ability to identify agricultural pests and invasive alien species.
- Improve the conservation and sustainable
use of pollinator biodiversity.
- Facilitate the work of the African Pollinator Initiative (API) as a consortium between the African networks of BioNET.
Current activities
- Development of new projects within the API
network, including the GBIF World Bee Catalogue, the CBOL bee
barcode project, the project to database the Agricultural Research
Council’s bee collection, and the hosting of a symposium at the
2008 International Congress of Entomology.
- In support of the work of SADC plant inspectors, develop a DNA barcoding project for the easy and rapid identification of scale insects, a quarantine risk for agricultural crops and horticulture and one of the world's most invasive groups of animals.
Recent achievements
- Organisation of training courses in
taxonomic techniques for entomology, arachnology, mycology and
nematology. Manuals on CD are available from the LOOP Coordinator
or the BioNET Secretariat.
- Launch of the Scale Insect Barcode Initiative (SIBI) at a meeting in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in February 2007.
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