AM3C Advisory Board endorses the International Biochar Conference

The Advisory Board of the Amina Mohammed Centre for Climate Change met on Thursday 3 September 2026 at the Federal Project Management Unit of the Agro-Climatic Resilience in Semi-Arid Landscapes programme in Wuye, Abuja. The meeting was chaired by Umar Abdulhamid, National Project Coordinator of ACReSAL.

Members present were Dr. Ishiyaku Musa Mohammed, Federal Permanent Secretary; Prof. Muhammad Maikano Ari, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academics) of Nasarawa State University, Keffi and Chairman of the AM3C Academic Board; and Newton Ovie Akpona, Executive Secretary of the Network for Agricultural Technical Education of Nigeria. Prof. Olumuyiwa James Jayeoba, Director of the Centre, served as Secretary, joined by the Deputy Director, Dr. Ibrahim Azara. Prof. Haruna Kuje Ayuba, Vice-Chancellor of Bingham University, Karu, sent his apologies.

This was the second meeting of the Advisory Board, following the inaugural sitting held immediately after the inauguration of the Centre on 30 June 2025.

The Board’s main business was the Keffi 2026 International Biochar Conference. The Director set out the case for the Centre making biochar its flagship: Nigeria has the only biochar initiative of its kind in Africa, some fifteen years old, and work is already running in the country — GIZ programmes, the Soil Values programme in Bauchi, Jigawa and Kano, and Sasakawa’s work installing pyrolysers so that farmers practise slash-and-char in place of slash-and-burn — without any convening that brings it together. The conference will be the fifth national biochar conference since 2015, after Bowen, Ibadan and Abeokuta, and the first held outside the South-West since 2018.

The Centre co-hosts with the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa. On FARA’s advice continental research bodies including CORAF and CCARDESA were invited and have confirmed they will join online, so the conference will run as a hybrid event with papers offered by participants outside the country. The Board endorsed the hosting of the conference and the concept as presented, and asked the Centre to strengthen its virtual and exhibition components and to build a categorised database of biochar practitioners as the basis of a lasting community of practice.

Members pressed for the Centre’s work to be demonstrable on the ground as well as in the seminar room. Prof. Ari asked for an impact or demonstration site that can be visited and verified, arguing that a named community and site would carry the Centre’s case further than advocacy alone. Dr. Mohammed asked that the conference not be approached as an academic event alone, and that the link between practitioners and the research community is the value the Centre can uniquely supply.

The Director then reported on the Centre’s first teaching cohort. Forty-nine postgraduate students are admitted, twenty-six at doctoral and twenty-three at master’s level, and classes are running. Every student at both levels has an academic supervisor and an industry supervisor, so that a student working on land restoration in Bauchi under ACReSAL, for example, can carry that work into a thesis and the Centre can measure its impact rather than confining students to a classroom. Students also take internationally certified modules, including UNITAR modules that carry credit. Candidates on the waiting list will be admitted in the second semester. Members rose in commendation of the Director and the secretariat.

The Board agreed that a joint meeting of the Board of Trustees, the Advisory Board and the Academic Board be convened in the last quarter of 2026.