UNESCO SCIENCE REPORT

West Africa
Box 18.1: The African Biosafety Network of Expertise
The African Biosafety Network
of Expertise was established in
Ouagadougou on 23 February 2010
with the signing of a host agreement
between NEPAD and the Government
of Burkina Faso. The network serves
as a resource for regulators dealing
with safety issues related to the
introduction and development of
genetically modified organisms. In
addition to providing regulators with
access to policy briefs and other
relevant information online in English
and French, the network organizes
national and subregional workshops
on specific topics.
For instance, one-week biosafety
courses for African regulators were
run by the network in Burkina Faso
in November 2013 and in Uganda
in July 2014, in partnership with the
University of Michigan (USA). Twentytwo
regulators from Ethiopia, Kenya,
Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania,
Uganda and Zimbabwe took part in
the latter course.
consultative workshop to validate
Togo’s revised biosafety law. Around
60 participants took part, including
government officials, researchers,
lawyers, biosafety regulators and civil
society representatives; the workshop
was chaired by a member of the National
Biosafety Committee. The aim of the
draft bill was to align Togo’s biosafety
law signed in January 2009 with
international biosafety regulations and
best practices, especially the Nagoya
Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol
on Liability and Redress that Togo had
signed in September 2011. The validation
workshop was a critical step before the
new bill could be tabled at the National
Assembly for adoption later that year.
In June 2014, the network organized a
four-day study tour to South Africa for
ten regulators and policy-makers from
Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi,
Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The
main objective was to allow them
to interact directly with their peers
and industrial practitioners in South
Africa. The study tour was organized
under the auspices of the NEPAD
Planning and Coordinating Agency, in
partnership with the Southern Africa
Network for Biosciences (SANBio), see
Box 19.1).
The African Biosafety Network of
Expertise was conceptualized in
Africa’s Science and Technology
Consolidated Plan of Action (2005) and
fulfils the recommendation of the
High-Level African Panel on Modern
Biotechnology, entitled Freedom to
Innovate (Juma and Serageldin, 2007).
The network is funded by the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation.
Source: www. nepadbiosafety.net
In April 2014, the network ran a training
workshop in Nigeria at the request of
the Federal Ministry of Environment
for 44 participants drawn from
government ministries, regulatory
agencies, universities and research
institutions. The aim was to strengthen
the regulatory capacity of institutional
biosafety committees. This training
was considered important to ensure
continued regulatory compliance
for ongoing confined field trials and
multilocation trials for Maruca-resistant
cowpea and biofortified sorghum.
The workshop was run in partnership
with the International Food Policy
Research Institute’s Program for
Biosafety Systems.
GM commercialized crops
Confined field trials and biosafety laws
Confined field trials without biosafety laws
COMOROS
From 28 April to 2 May 2014, Togo’s
Ministry of Environment and Forest
Resources organized a stakeholders’
Biosafety laws without confined field trials
No biosafety laws or confined field trials
Source of map: 2013 African Biosafety Network of Expertise
Chapter 18
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