Ministry partners UNIDO, World Bank on science, technology development

AS part of efforts to diversify the Nigerian economy away from oil, the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology has initiated a technical partnership with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and the World Bank to harness the benefits of science and technology.

At different meetings with the Ministry, officials of the two development agencies promised to provide the required assistance to boost Nigeria’s capacity in the sector.

UNIDO Manager (Programme Development and Technical Cooperation Division), Mr. Phillipi Scholtes, who led a team to the Ministry in Abuja, also spoke on efforts to boost the energy sector.

He said: “This is a matter of injecting science and technology into the scheme. We want to see how we can work together to inject science and technology for the transformation of the agro commodities particularly in the food sector and this make sense in terms of contributing to food security.

He spoke of a $2.6m assistance to Nigeria under the UNIDO Global Environment Facility (GEF) to address environmental issues.

He said: “GEF is prepared to contribute funding into this initiative and so we made the case and obtained funding for $2.6 million and so this will help us up scale and demonstrate small hydro to power to power small households and factories to places that are not reached by the national grid across the country.”

He went on: “At UNIDO, science and technology is the backbone of our activities. The need of our member nations is that we should focus on a sustained of an industrial based development.

“We stand for industrial development supporting countries in their industrial development.”

He described innovation as critical in technology.

“Energy and environment are also very science and technology intensive because the skill profile we employ in this science and technology and domain and in energy front. We have a strong cooperation with this ministry,” he noted.

He also spoke of the interest of UNIDO in promoting biotechnology and life science and technology.

Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu spoke of government’s desire to use science, technology and innovation to pull out Nigeria out of poverty.

He said: “We want to grow our economy and we want to redistribute wealth effectively and above all we want to reduce the number of people who are unemployed and poor in Nigerian. We believe that the most sustainable way to do is to employ science technology and innovation.”

He went on: “We want to use the various technologies that our people have produced to improve on those technologies so that when you now apply them you will be adding value.