The Centre for Dryland Agriculture (CDA) and the Africa Centre of Excellence in Population Health and Policy (ACEPHAP) have achieved high scores in the mid-term assessment of the performances of the Africa Centres of Excellence for Development Impact (ACE Impact) project performed by the World Bank. The information was conveyed on Monday, 7th November 2022 by Mr Harry Gerard Crimi Jnr in his presentation during the Nigeria country roundtable between the World Bank, the French Development Agency (AFD), and the 17 Nigerian ACEs. With this development, CDA and ACEPHAP will receive additional funds from the World Bank.

The ACE Impact project is a higher education initiative funded by the World and AFD, which formally took-off in 2019 in eleven countries of West and Central Africa. The aim of the project is to establish strong specialized regional centres that will each focus on a single thematic area and provide world-class training, research and outreach focused on addressing the development challenges of Africa. The Centres were competitively selected, and BUK emerged as one of the few Universities with more than one Centre (CDA and ACEPHAP). The initial grant to CDA was five million US dollars, while that of ACEPHAP was six million US dollars.

In the implementation of the ACE Impact project, the World Bank employs a “results-based” funding approach in which funds are released to the Centres based on performance and achievement of key milestones. After taking stock of the performances of all the Centres during the mid-term of the project, the high-performing centres will be given addition funds while poorly performing centres will have their initial allocation reduced.

It could be recalled that in the first phase of the ACE project (2014-2019), CDA got an initial grant of about seven million US Dollars and an additional amount of one million US dollars following its excellent performance at mid-term.

The Vice Chancellor, Professor Sagir Adamu Abbas, has congratulated the two Centres for their excellent performance and for positively projecting the image of BUK globally.