UniAbuja, others to receive over £5m in sickle cell grant

The University of Abuja’s National Centre of Excellence for Sickle Cell Disease Research and Training has disclosed that it will get more than £5 million in funding to enhance its research capacity and develop lasting solutions for sickle cell disease.

Prof. Obiageli Nnodu, the Co-PI of Patient-Centred Sickle Cell Disease Management in Sub-Saharan Africa (PACTS) and Director of CESRTA, made this known at a workshop organised in synergy with NCESRTA and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM).

The event was titled ‘Strengthening Institutional Research Capacity and Safeguarding’.

Prof. Nnodu stated : “It’s a research that we are carrying out with Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Kwame Nkrumah University of Health and Allied Science and Technology and University of Zambia Teaching Hospital. It’s over £5 million.”

Nnodu stressed the imperative of research for national development, saying that it was beneficial for African institutions to develop their capacity for research training. He underlined the need to establish the right infrastructure, not only to secure grants but also to monitor, manage, and conduct research projects, as well as to report and implement research findings into society and policy.

“This capacity strengthening workshop is a very important one in our university because over the past four years, we’ve had significant increases in the number of research grants that we’re getting but we also have what I would tend to say is a population, a faculty that needs to have their capacity built to participate in funded research,” he said.

The Don, who disclosed that the centre has benefited from both internal and external institutional-based research grants over the years, noted that even though there was sufficient research funding for every faculty to conduct annual assessments, only a few lecturers were exploring the opportunity to utilise the funds and carry out research.

“The external grants are less than 10, and it’s pretty much the same people, which we are not happy about. We want them to increase. The internal institutional-based research fund has been increasing from five to 10, to 20, to 37, to 55, although our funding agency doesn’t think we are doing enough because the goal is to have every faculty member assess one in a year, and the provision is there.

“It used to be up to N2 million, but now it’s N5 million for the institutional-based research, and that’s really the one I want to train people in every faculty. Every lecturer should be able to win such and carry out the pilot studies that will help them to do more.”

The Principal Investigator, PACTS, Prof. Imelda Bates, noted cuts in external research funding to Africa; however maintained institutions across sub-Saharan Africa needed to have strong research systems so they could decide what research they want to undertake by themselves.