**4.5 Financial resources for R&D**

The main challenge for public agricultural biotechnology R&D in SSA remains how to mobilize investment capital (beyond what is needed for personnel and infrastructure) to initiate or sustain research (and facilitate the process of taking findings to commercial use). Although there has been some growth in the level of funding to ARD in some countries, the level of financing is still extremely low, especially for biotechnology, and not allowing countries to engage effectively in cutting-edge biotech research. Most of the current biotechnology R&D programs are donor funded—with very limited domestic investments; in most countries the allocation is only for salaries (for the limited number of biotech personnel). Although precise value of agricultural biotechnology spending is difficult to obtain, estimates made on the basis of 2014 sector figures (focusing only on crops and livestock) obtained from ASTI database show that most countries invest very limited amounts on agricultural biotechnology. Mobilization of resources (from domestic and other sources) for agricultural biotech is clearly a major area that governments need to look at. In the meantime, given the high cost of biotech R&D, available investments need to be used in a much more coordinated manner to achieve efficiencies from scale and complementarity—and hence the need for cross-sector coordination in biotech R&D. Despite the clear dominance of the public sector both in the financing and implementation of agricultural research, the unstable funding of ARD to date suggests that other avenues should be explored. Universities in SSA, for example, are an underutilized resource that could greatly increase research output with just slight increases in targeted funding to them.
