As Africa continues to embrace emerging technologies, the African Union (AU) has identified Nigeria’s role as very crucial in the creation and sustenance of biotech as the blueprint for Africa’s development.
Speaking during the three-day genome editing (GE) intervention meeting organised by the African Union Development Agency New Partnership for Africa’s Development (AUDA-NEPAD) Centre of Excellence in Science, Technology and Innovation (CoE STI) with support from the National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA) in Abuja, the acting director, knowledge, management and programme, AUDA-NEPAD, Ms. Florence Nazare, underscored the need for Africa to put science in the heart of what it does.
Nazare pointed out that Nigeria has played a great role in pointing other African countries in the right direction, to adopt and deploy innovative technologies in tackling its agricultural challenges to enhance productivity.
She posited that the centres of excellence genome editing project aim to gauge and further strengthen the capacity of key stakeholders in the selected countries to help Africa optimise its food production.
“This is a project that we are working on in several countries to promote genome editing technologies within member states because we see that Africa requires to optimise its agriculture production. It also needs to optimise the shelf life of products and produce more products for the future to ensure that food security is achieved.
“If we are looking at the objectives before us, we are keen on seeing a globalised Africa that is competitive and productive. In light of this, we are putting science at the heart of what we do and if we look at it we do want to highlight the importance of Nigeria in the creation and sustenance of biotech as a blueprint for Africa’s development. That is thinking of African solutions to Africa’s problems, whereby Africa sees itself as resourceful with the need to utilise its capabilities (scientific etc),” she said.
