Silas Obukosia

Silas Obukosia is the Director of Regulatory Affairs at Africa Harvest, where he works on issues related to biotechnology and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Africa. He previously worked as a Biotechnology Advisor for United States Agency for International Development (USAID).


 * "Silas Obukosia is the Director of Regulatory Affairs at Africa Harvest. He holds a PhD in Molecular Genetics from Pennsylvania State University, USA; MSc. in Genetics and Plant Breeding, and BSc. in Agriculture from the University of Nairobi. He has attended several short courses in Biosafety and Intellectual Property Rights at Michigan State University and in Kenya.


 * "At Africa Harvest he oversees all biosafety and regulatory issues of the program from technology development, product development and deployment.


 * "In his position at Africa Harvest he has trained several regulators and scientists in biosafety and regulatory covering: contained experimentation, confined field trials and biosafety at commercialization stage of GMO products in Burkina Faso and in Kenya.


 * "Prior to joining Africa Harvest [he] worked as a Biotechnology Advisor for United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to its Kenya Biotechnology Program that encompassed three programs: Developing and managing the implementation of Kenya’s National Biosafety Regulatory Framework, a National Biotechnology Outreach Program and Biotechnology research Program. During his tenure with USAID he developed a “Strategy to facilitate the Enactment of Kenya Biosafety Bill” and facilitated the Development of regulations for facilitating the Biosafety Bill”. Previously he worked as a Lecturer with the University of Nairobi and later was promoted to Senior Lecturer in the Department of Crop Science.


 * "His research experience at the University involved development of laboratory and commercial procedures for producing citrus greening- free seedlings using tissue culture and molecular biology approaches, development of genomics of Kenyan strains of Liberabacter africanum, pathogenic strains that cause the citrus greening disease, development of indexing procedures for the same pathogen. Silas has published several papers in both scientific refereed journals and proceeding and published three training manuals in field of biotechnology."

Obukosia was with USAID from at least 2003 until 2007. He worked at University of Nairobi in the Department of Crop Science as of 2002 and had already taken his position at Africa Harvest by the end of 2008.

Related SourceWatch Articles

 * USAID Promotion of Agricultural Biotechnology
 * U.S. State Department Promotion of Agricultural Biotechnology
 * U.S. Department of State Biotechnology Outreach Funds
 * Africa Harvest