COMING UP: Africa Phytosanitary Programme (APP) national training workshops

The IPPC Secretariat is supporting the training of 350 plant health inspectors in eight African countries to hone their skills and enhance their knowledge in plant pest surveillance using modern scientific and digital pest survey tools. Under the IPPC’s Africa Phytosanitary Programme (APP) and with funding from the European Commission and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, national training sessions will be held from September to December 2025 in Egypt, Malawi, Morocco, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, in collaboration with the national plant protection organizations (NPPOs) and FAO.

The training sessions will strengthen the capacity of phytosanitary personnel- who will receive and use tablets with APP digital tools, building a critical mass of professionals equipped to rapidly detect, respond to and recover from outbreaks of plant pests that have regulatory, economic and environmental impacts. They build on the regional train-the-trainer sessions held in Egypt (2023) and South Africa (2025), empowering master trainers to pass on the APP training to national peers. Read more about APP here.