Jumoke Olasunkanmi
The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has commended the Global Fund Resilient Sustainable Systems for Health (RSSH) for its $2 million grant to the agency.
According to the agency’s Director General, Professor Mojisola Adeyeye, the 3-year grant which ran from 2020 and is expected to end at the end of 2023, helped the agency achieved its goals of strengthening pharmaco-vigilance.
Speaking during a press conference in Abuja on Monday, Adeyeye explained that the $2 million grant was remitted to the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) as the principal recipient, which then disbursed to NAFDAC as a sub recipient.
The Director General added that the agency spent $1.13 million on the track and trace initiative which helps to monitor medicines coming into the country by noting where it is from and other important information such as the distributors and manufacturers to ensure quality assurance and proper monitoring; and training of over 1700 staff in the public and private sector. The agency also spent $1 million to procure lab equipment.
She said: “We will like to share with the public the support that we get from our partners to strengthen our system to ensure that the medicine in the market are checked to ensure that they are supposed to be in the market.
”It also helped to ensure that if there is any adverse effect that is taking place following the use of medicine or vaccine, to ensure that our supply chain can be tracked and traced. This means that if a medicine enters the country and is going to Gombe or Akwa-Ibom, we have the technology to track it. These are the kind of support that the global fund has been to NAFDAC.”
According to the agency, the grant also helped in facilitating the advancement of the Yaba Drug Lab which has now attained the World Health Organisation’s prerequisites for standard drug testing and analysis.
Prof. Adeyeye added that the global fund also helped the agency invest in capacity building for staff members, procurement of mobile scanners and routers, rapid screening machines, among others.
On his part, the Director General of NACA, Dr Gambo Aliyu, expressed satisfaction with NAFDAC’s accountability and transparency, noting that the agency gave ‘value for the money’ they got.
“I am excited as I sit down and listen to the DG narrating the successes achieved with just $2 million. This is true value for money,” he stated.
The Acting Executive Secretary and Country Coordinating Mechanism for Global Fund, Mr Ibrahim Tajudeen, when asked if the global fund is satisfied with NAFDAC’S appropriation of the grant, said that the global fund has a robust and transparent mechanism used to monitor resources as he confirmed that the $2 million grant was judiciously utilised.
“The mechanisms for monitoring resources is robust and very very transparent to ensure the resources are safeguarded and For the successful utilisation of the allocated resources. I’m happy to inform you that Nigeria as a country is privileged to receive additional resources because we’ve used the one allocated for 2021 to 2023 judiciously. We now received another funding in form of grant- $933 million from January 2024 to December 2026 cut across HIV, Tuberculosis, Malaria and resilient system strengthening for health. That is to show that we’ve done so well in this period to deserve another grant.”
