The Asian rice (Oryza sativa L.) was probably introduced into West Africa at the beginning of the 16th century and first adopted by farmers living in the Upper Guinea Coast. Since most Asian rice genotypes were higher yielding than the indigenous African rice, they were easily adopted by the resource-poor farmers in most parts of the continent. As a result, the Oryza sativa spp. japonica and indica account for about 31% and 49%, respectively, of the rice collection conserved at the AfricaRice genebank.
Based on the AfricaRice genebank germplasm distribution database between 1995 and 2019, we found out that nearly 64% of the O. sativa collection (55% of the japonica and 69% of the indica accessions) conserved at our genebank wase distributed to 141 institutions across 55 countries. The frequency of distribution per accession was highly variable, which ranged from 1 to 271, with an overall average of 5 shipments within the 25 years. The accessions were distributed to NARS (66.5% of the samples), CGIAR centers (29.2%), Universities (3.2%), non-government organizations (0.8%), and private companies (0.2%). Here, we selected the top 23 Oryza sativa spp. japonica and 61 Oryza sativa spp. indica accessions that were distributed 51-271 times, with an average of 89 distributions per accessions during the 25 years.