Pamela Afokpe took the vegetables her grandmothers grew — and won farming's field-research prize for them

In Benin, plant scientist Pamela Afokpe has spent nearly a decade giving West Africa's indigenous vegetables the rigorous science usually reserved for export crops. This week she accepted the 2026 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application at the World Food Prize in Des Moines. Working from the IITA campus in Benin, she collected more than 2,000 regional crop varieties and bred Sika Gboma, a leafy vegetable that tolerates the bacterial wilt that once wiped out whole fields — and stays fresh longer, so the women who trade it lose less. Her nursery methods cut farmers' input costs by 40%, and Sika alone produced over 3,000 tons of food in its first three years. 'African indigenous vegetables belong at the center of the global food security map,' she says.

SDG 2 · Zero hunger — Mechanism: tech innovation