dr Beatrice Tchuidjang Nganso
Building a continental map of Africa's pollinators
Across Africa, hundreds of millions of people depend on pollinators.
Bees, butterflies, flies and other insects help pollinate crops and trees that support food production, biodiversity and rural livelihoods. According to researcher Beatrice Tchuidjang Nganso, pollination services support around 650 million people across the continent, while more than 10 million people depend on beekeeping for part of their livelihoods.
Yet despite their importance, scientists still know surprisingly little about which pollinators interact with which plants across large parts of Africa.
For Nganso, a finalist for the 2026 Jennifer Ward Oppenheimer Research Grant, closing that knowledge gap has become a central research challenge.
Her proposed project, Building an Interactive African Platform of Plant–Pollinator Networks (AfriPollNet) to Strengthen Biodiversity Conservation, Food Security and Livelihoods, aims to create the first continent-wide platform bringing together information about African pollinators, the plants they rely on and the environmental conditions that shape those relationships.
The need for such a resource is becoming increasingly urgent.
Africa is losing an estimated four million hectares of forest each year, while agricultural land and urban areas continue to expand. At the same time, large parts of the continent remain poorly studied when it comes to pollinators and the plants that sustain them. In many cases, information exists in scattered datasets, unpublished reports and individual studies, making it difficult to build a continent-wide picture of these ecological relationships.
Nganso’s project seeks to address these challenges by building AfriPollNet, an open-access platform designed to bring together plant–pollinator information from across Africa.
The work would begin by compiling at least 300,000 existing records from published and unpublished datasets held by researchers across nine African countries. The project also proposes generating a further 50,000 records through new field surveys in under-studied regions, including the Guinean forests of Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, where researchers will study pollinator activity in places such as Mt. Nimba and the Kounounkan Forest Reserve.
But the research goes beyond documenting which insects visit which flowers.
Nganso also plans to investigate the nutritional value of nectar and pollen from at least 200 forage plants. By analysing key nutrients such as carbohydrates, proteins, lipids and sterols, the project aims to identify which plants provide the most valuable food resources for pollinators.
At the same time, the project seeks to train a new generation of African pollinator researchers. MSc students will lead fieldwork in participating countries, with at least half of the student cohort being women. Farmers and young people will also be trained to record pollinator observations using the citizen-science platform iNaturalist, helping to expand knowledge while building local capacity for pollinator monitoring.
The resulting AfriPollNet platform would allow users to explore pollinator species, plant species and the networks of interactions that connect them. It would also include information on the nutritional value of forage plants, species distributions and environmental conditions that influence pollinator communities.
Without pollinators, many crops become less productive and ecosystems less resilient. Yet protecting them requires understanding not only the insects themselves but also the plants and habitats that sustain them.
At a time when African landscapes are changing rapidly, Nganso’s research asks whether that understanding can be assembled at a continental scale.
The first step may be knowing which species depend on one another in the first place.
About the researcher
Dr Marc Van Goethem is a 35-year-old microbial ecologist at the University of Pretoria. His research explores how microbial communities adapt to extreme environments, from Antarctic deserts to hyper-arid drylands, and how these microorganisms can contribute to ecosystem restoration and resilience in a changing climate.
Dr Beatrice Tchuidjang Nganso is a research scientist at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) in Kenya. An entomologist specialising in pollinator health and biodiversity, her work investigates the ecological and genetic factors affecting honeybees and other insect pollinators. Her journey into pollinator research began unexpectedly in a sacred forest in Ghana, where she first fell in love with bees during her master’s studies.
This fascination led her to wait to begin her PhD until she found a project specifically focused on pollinators, eventually studying the devastating Varroa destructor mite. She credits Dr Victoria Soroker as her greatest mentor, whose pioneering work on honeybee health inspired Nganso to combine fundamental science with practical conservation solutions.
Today, Nganso is driven by the conviction that protecting pollinators is essential to safeguarding Africa’s food security and biodiversity. She finds deep motivation in capacity-building, noting that the enthusiasm of the young citizen scientists she has trained in Cameroon and Kenya reminds her that she is building something lasting.
“During my biodiversity monitoring project in Cameroon, I trained secondary school and university students to use iNaturalist to document pollinators and plants,” says Nganso.
“Months later, many of them are still actively recording observations and sharing their findings on the iNaturalist platform. Their enthusiasm showed me that conservation is most effective when local communities, especially young people, are empowered to become active contributors to scientific knowledge.”
2026 Jennifer Ward Oppenheimer Research Grant finalist Beatrice Tchuidjang Nganso is developing AfriPollNet, a continent-wide platform that will bring together information on African pollinators, the plants they depend on and the ecological relationships that connect them.