Biosafety Agency partners NEPAD in capacity building
Zeniat Abubakar, Abuja
The National Biosafety Management Agency in Nigeria, NBMA, says it will continue to collaborate with key sectors like New Partnership For Africa Development, NEPAD in areas of Biosafety to strengthen capacity to deliver its mandate.
Director General NBMA, Dr. Rufus Ebegba disclosed this at the Stakeholders Review of Draft National Biosafety Guidelines & Training Stewardship of Genetically Modified products in Nigeria, held in Abuja, the nation’s capital.
He said that the training is to strengthen capacity for NBMA to carry out its mandate and function as a Biosafety regulator.
“This training is specifically to train the NBMA staff and some other Ministries and agencies representatives on the GMO products stewardship, what that simply means is to ensure that the permit holder those who have be growing GMOs or having GMOs follow specific guidelines and protocol to ensure that the desired result expected from GMOs are achieved.” Dr Ebegba stated.
Dr Ebegba also said that the training would also strengthen Nigeria’s National Biosafety system on issues of adoption of modern biotechnology.
“Today’s training is key, because its a new area which we have not been handling over the years, we have beginning to see the need for us to include it in our regulatory system, it is on that note our partners will be given us this training for us to be efficient and standout in the areas of stewardship.” He said.
He stressed that the workshop would also help the Agency to leverage and expand its knowledge.
“What we are expecting at this workshop is that we are going to be including the issues of product stewardship in our terms and condition of approval, which we have not seen over the years the essence is to ensure that the technology is actually gets to the best results without compromising safety.” He added.
The Principal Program Officer New Partnership For Africa Development, NEPAD, Mr Samuel Timpo, said that the training is to strengthen capacity for NBMA to carry out its mandate and function as a Biosafety regulator.
He also noted that the training would help regulators carry out their mandates within their system to foster cooperation to ensure full compliance of laws and regulations are observed at all levels.
He also commended the NBMA, in its effort in making key decisions in some GM products in its National responsibilities.
“As the Africa Union we ensure useful safe product reached our people, if we are to ensure that these product have the life spans that they should have then we must steward them its part of our responsibilities to ensures that the products are performing well over the lifespan, stewardship ensures that. As AUDA-NEPAD our mandate include providing knowledge based advisory support and also serving as the technical interface that enable partners to come on board, in this training we are making sure that we are making used of your own National institutions that have capacity, bringing in international partners from the continent, global experts by giving the regulators best knowledge to ensure that as a continent we achieve our agenda 2063 the Africa we want.” Mr Timpo explained.
He added that the training was to bring together AUDA-NEPAD and Nigeria in the area of Biosafety, especially areas where previous emphasis has not been focus on in the area of product stewardship.
“Since 2010, we came up with a flagship program for Biosafety, Nigeria was one of the first countries we started working with, so this is over a decade of partnership with Nigeria, we’ve provided training opportunities indeed, the past few months, some of your offices were in the US to undergo a three state storm on what America is doing. We provided training to other parts of the world, including Africa.” Mr Timpo said.
He added that the workshop will further help AUDA-NEPAD build stronger relationships with the Agency while also reviewing some of its technical documents.
