COVID-19: NUC to unveil compendium of varsities’ interventions

The National Universities Commission (NUC) has said that a compendium of contributions of Nigerian universities to fighting COVID-19 will soon be unveiled, while sustained efforts would be made by the Commission to train Nigerian academics on research-grant proposal writing.

Deputy Executive Secretary of NUC, Dr Suleiman Ramon-Yusuf, who made this known, on Wednesday, in Abuja, added that concerted efforts were being made with the Nigeria Diaspora Biomedical Research Group to build the capacity of Nigerian scientists on biomedical research.

He noted that the partnership which is being facilitated by a Nigerian scientist at the University of Florida, USA, Prof Folakemi Odedina, was also aimed at training the researchers on writing skills for grant-winning research proposals.

Ramon-Yusuf spoke at a pre-event news conference of the inaugural summit of the Nigeria Diaspora Biomedical Research Group, where he expressed concern that a number of available research grants in Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) and globally, could not be accessed because of lack of capacity to write grant-winning proposals by many Nigerian academics.

He said the Commission was, however, excited that Nigerians universities contributed positively to the fight against COVID-19 pandemic through some verifiable interventions, including the development of local ventilators, hand-washing machines among others.

He disclosed that all the verifiable contributions by Nigerian universities have been meticulously documented in a compendium that would be unveiled to the Nigerian public and global community.

He said the current partnership would forge relationships on sabbatical support and bidirectional faculty exchange between Nigerian academic staff as well as the staff of the various collaborative universities abroad, particularly the University of Florida.

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He said: “Research capacity is quite low in our system, just as we have challenges with research infrastructure.

“So the overall objective of this strategic alliance between the Nigerian university system and Nigerians in the Diaspora and in fact including people who are not Nigerians we are trying to harness our network so that we can have an opportunity to train our people in terms of research grant writing, research techniques,” he said.

While speaking on the biomedical research, he said it was even more critical at a time of the COVID-19 pandemic because all over the world, scientists are working round the clock in an attempt to find a solution by way of a vaccine for the SARS cov2 which is popularly called the COVID-19 virus.

On the virtual summit held by the Diaspora Biomedical Group, Ramon-Yusuf said the objectives were to develop expertise, infrastructural support as well as an opportunity for sabbatical leaves and collaborative research for the country’s academics.

“Another objective, of course, is to augment the existing biomedical research training programmes which will foster career development amongst young academics. Today’s activities revolve around grant writing capacity building.

“Many people know that in our system, over the years, people have been complaining about the inability of many of our researchers to access grants in TETFund on the basis of their inability to write grant-winning proposals.

“So we hope that at the end of today’s activities we would have succeeded in honing the research grant writing skills of some of our younger academics.

“We hope that at the end of the summit, would have arrived at some strategies that would lead us to the sustainable approaches we need to leverage on this collaboration and partnership to build both professional and institutional capacity in our system,” he said.

NIGERIAN TRIBUNE