Africa Harvest — founded by Kenyan scientist Florence Wambugu — supports policy development and scientific and institutional capacity building across East Africa and promotes the use of modern biotechnologies to help the region's farmers. The foundation's flagship project uses tissue culture technology to reproduce disease-free banana plants for distribution across East Africa.

It also runs a communication and advocacy programme to promote public acceptance of biotechnologies — especially genetic modification. The organisation publishes information about its tree-planting programme in Kenya and links to other African and international organisations working in biotechnology.

AMMANET promotes using genetic marker-assisted selection (MAS) technologies to accelerate African plant breeding efforts and deliver food security and economic growth. Over 100 African scientists established the network in 2003, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.

The network brings regional and international agricultural researchers together, publishing information about its activities and providing contact information of all its members. It also links to news, scientific articles and other useful resources on MAS.

The BioSafe Train project is an international collaboration of scientists aiming to build capacity for dealing with the challenges associated with implementing genetically modified (GM) crops in East Africa.

It publishes information on students' research projects that cover topics such as the environmental impacts of GM maize in Kenya, biodiversity in cotton fields in Uganda and the ecological risks posed by transgenic rice in Tanzania.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research is an association of public and private members supporting a system of 16 Future Harvest centres that work in more than 100 countries to mobilise cutting-edge science to reduce hunger and poverty, improve human nutrition and health, and protect the environment. As well as taking a keen interest in agricultural biotechnology, much of CGIAR's research has direct relevance to biodiversity. CGIAR also coordinates a global network of genebanks that aims to keep the bulk of the world's plant genetic resources in the public domain.

This non-profit organisation aims to develop sustainable ecological farming in Africa and India. ICRISAT's mission is "to help empower 600 million poor people to overcome hunger, poverty and a degraded environment in the dry tropics through better agriculture".

ICRISAT's BioPower initiative aims to ensure that bioenergy research benefits the poor. Its activities include analysing bioenergy trends and understanding their repercussions for the poor, and enabling governments to formulate pro-bioenergy policies that benefit poor people.

PlantBio is a grant-making initiative from the South African Department of Science and Technology. It aims to develop a strong and sustainable plant biotechnology sector in South Africa by promoting new products and services, incubating commercial programmes and new businesses, building scientific capacity and developing human resources.

PlantBio prioritises technologies aimed at alleviating poverty and improving food security — for example, biofertilisers, plant breeding, tissue culture and genetic modification. The organisation encourages collaborating institutes to build national capacities and consolidate costs.

It publishes information on how to apply for funding and hosts a useful page of links to South African biotech investors, business incubators, funding agencies and service providers.