By Elizabeth Uwandu

President of African University of Science and Technology, AUST, Professor Kingston Nyamapfene, yesterday, said Nigeria should strive to meet up with one percent GDP in science, technology and innovation if it must catch up with the rest of the world.

While addressing partners of the AUST at the Africa Capacity Report for 2017, Prof. Kingston said the African Capacity Building Foundation, ACBF, was bent on developing institutional capacity by investing heavily in high quality universities, state-of-the-art, well-equipped laboratories, ICT infrastructure and research funding.

The Africa Capacity Reports, ACRs, supports the entrenchment of capacity development in Africa’s development agenda. Each report and its composite index, the Africa Capacity Index, ACI, is meant to narrate all the critical capacity dimensions that are pertinent to Africa’s growth and economic transformation at country and continental level.

The don added that ACR was an important landmark for the development of science and technology policy in Africa because of the way  it is coordinated by the Africa Capacity Building Foundation which is one of the primary partners.

“From the recommendation that came out of the report, I will start with the level of commitment from the government that African government intends to make statements about what they do to support science technology and innovation. But the aim was to provide at least one percent of their GDP toward STI and we are not seeing much of that in most of the African countries and the report recommends that for Africa to catch up we need to pump out that one percent to three percent of GDP.”