NGF, Grand Challenges Nigeria Hold Annual Event in Abuja

We are trying to, in a sense, crowdfund innovations in health and development. We want to locally define the health challenges that we need to solve with innovation and locally pull together all of those researchers and researchers to help us solve them. ...challenges in Nigerians' better health, and we believe that there is an incidence of mortality and morbidity. Tendis Nigeria was established in 2024. Two years later, we have funded researchers who are innovating in maternal, neonatal, and child. They are completing their proof of concept. And the next question we're asking is what does it take to take these innovations to scale? We have brought together government, funders, potential adoption institutions, and having conversations around what evidence is enough, what coalitions need to come together. So Grand Challenges has a board of various organizations. First of all, the Nutrition Society of Nigeria that birthed the project. We're very grateful to them for We also have the Federal Ministry of Innovation, Science and Tech being the innovation ministry of the government and they are, so to say, the anchor government partner for the project. And the Office of the Vice President launched this project in 2004 and has provided leadership and guidance and direction and anchored what we do in national... I talked about us moving our... proof of concepts to scale with adoption institutions and this is where NGF comes in. NGF partners with the states to identify best practices that work in health and to spread these best practices across the states and it is these institutions at state level that will potentially take up our innovations and take them to scale and together with NGF we're trying to make sure that But that's, you know, the news got forward. This initiative is critical. I mean, Nigerians are the best researchers anywhere, everywhere in the world. And the question is, how can we get that intelligence and brilliance of the Nigerian mind into solutions that would reach mother and children? The focus of Grand Challenges Nigeria this year has been on mothers and newborns and so the Office of the Vice President, His Excellency actually the Vice President, launched this Grand Challenges Nigeria... exactly two years ago, and he believes that, of course, even President Bala Ahmed Tinubu believes that Nigeria's greatest asset is its people, and we can only harness that when we start early enough looking at the mother and the newborn child. So what we're seeing within these two years, and congratulations to the Grants of the Mindies Nigeria team, is that 10 researchers have been given up to 60 million Naira seed funding for their innovative ideas. But we don't want that to end at the shelf. We want it to get to the mother and child that needs them. And what that determines is having institutions that will adopt these innovations that they've been able to come up with. And so we've seen, for instance, in Patu State, they're able to do a birth defect detection early enough. In Oyo, there's sepsis, how to detect sepsis early in children. We've seen Imo, the Mama Link, How they've been able to link. Ambulatory services to mothers and children in underserved areas and in grassroot areas. Well, I will say if there is one person that will be the most happiest for today's meeting, it will be myself. For that simple reason that the Grand Challenges Nigeria project we are talking about now was bought by the Nutrition Society of Nigeria which I lead. And the society has acquired a grant from the Gates Foundation to be able to sponsor a grand challenges project that will be able to address some of the grand challenges of Nigeria. Now we are just targeting maternal and child health projects that will be addressing any challenge that we have around that area. So I will be one of the most happiest seeing that we are now convening. It's an annual meeting to be able to review progress that has been made across the projects that are going on and also to chart our way forward in terms of scaling up the investments and also be able to see how best we can make them more impactful at the end of the day. You can see that Nigeria's Governors Forum has been very prominent in today's meeting and you can see the Office of the Vice President is there, you can see the Federal Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology is there. While this project started from the Nutrition Society of Nigeria's investment that we got from the Gates Foundation, the ultimate goal is its sustainability. And sustainability totally relied on the government ownership of the project. And that's why you see that we don't even equate much as Nutrition Society of Nigeria. We equate more as Grand Challenges Nigeria because that's what is happening across the other countries. The government take the ownership and be able to sustain the initiative. So the government saying the government role for this project, I mean... We cannot underestimate how much government needs to invest in it. We are happy that the Ministry of Science and Innovation has started to put some budget lines for this project. We are looking forward to seeing the government's forum taken down to states and local governments if possible. But we've said that it's not about what we are doing here at Abuja, it's about how much is taken up by different levels of sub-nationals and get it implemented. And that's when we get the impact that we desire. importance of this event and this is an event where we are showcasing some innovations from researchers across Nigeria and also state teams from within the Nigerian states and I was saying that one of the critical things that we should know is that beyond innovation there is the need to see that such innovations are implementable and for this to happen there are some critical factors that have to be it has to be technically sound it has to be relevant There has to be evidence backing the effectiveness of these interventions. Then they have to be affordable and sustainable, and it can be anchored on existing institutional arrangements in respective state governments. So we as Nigerian Governors Forum, partnering with the Grand Challenges Nigeria and other partners, are saying that Nigeria does not lack talent. We have great ideas, but the question is, how do we move these great ideas From just being innovations to be mainstreamed into systems, to be scaled and to be utilized to impact the life of the woman and child in Nigeria for better health outcomes. That is the whole essence of what we are doing here today. And we have institutional adopters in the room. We have other stakeholders who are interested in the great work that is being done by these researchers. And we look forward to having it scaled, adopted and scaled across Nigerian states.