The Africa Biofortified Sorghum (ABS) Project comprises a Consortium of nine – seven African and two American - institutions led by Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International. The US$18.5 million project is funded as part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health program.

The Grand Challenges (GC) seek to harness the power of science and technology to dramatically improve health in the world’s poorest countries. The initiative supports groundbreaking research to develop scientific breakthroughs for preventing, treating and curing diseases that kill millions of people in developing countries each year

A total of 14 Grand Challenges were identified based on suggestions from more than 1,000 scientists throughout the world, submitting more than 1,400 project ideas. From these, 43 projects involving 33 countries were selected for funding. 

The ABS Project seeks to develop sorghum with improved food quality by enriching it for essential amino acids (part of the protein component of the diet), and later by increasing its content in essential vitamins (vitamin A and E). This project is undertaken as part of the worldwide effort to improve the nutritional status of the rural poor by Biofortification (enrichment of food by biological means rather than addition of chemicals) of staple food crops. This is just one of the many research projects currently underway to harness the promise of gene technology to serve the poorest in the developing world.

Members of the ABS Project:  Africa Harvest; Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a subsidiary of DuPont; the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR); the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA); the Agricultural Research Council (ARC); the African Agricultural Technology Foundation(AATF);the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) the Universities of Pretoria and California-Berkeley.