Biosafety: Gates Foundation supports NEPAD with N236.9m grant

The African Union's NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency would soon receive a grant of $1,489,098, about N236.9 million in support of the African Biosafety Network of Expertise (ABNE) that is in progress by January 2012.

NaijaAgroNet gathered that assisting Africa is the major goal of ABNE in the effort to build a functional biosafety system for sustainable and safe application of agricultural biotechnology.

The achievement of this objective, it was also gathered by NaijaAgroNet, to be achieved through the empowerment of African regulators with science-based biosafety information, training and education, in addition to technical assistance and biosafety capacity building programmes.

The fund, NEPAD officials said, is granted following the submission of a proposal to the foundation for supplementary grant in order to expand the support to African regulators with more staff and to also align with the African Union (AU) remuneration policies.

NEPAD further revealed that the grant would be accessible by January 2012.

The grant from Bill Gates foundation made the total grant awarded for the Phase II to be $11,929,537 which is about N1.9 billion.

NaijaAgroNet equally gathered that the grant is important to bridge financial shortfalls in meeting programmatic activities and to ensure ABNE delivers on its objectives as revealed in the grant proposal.

Admin/LS

... Linking agrobiz, people & technology