Stamp Out Sleeping Sickness
About

RIU's exemplar Best Bet on sleeping sickness control in Uganda was selected at an early stage of the RIU programme. It was seen as one of the high-potential research outputs from previous DFID-supported agricultural research.

A key achievement was the establishment of the Stamp Out Sleeping Sickness (SOS) campaign. This is a public-private partnership which brought together a veterinary pharmaceutical company, a private philanthropic organization, the state agency responsible for coordinating sleeping sickness control in Uganda and researchers and students from Uganda and the UK.

Specioza Kazibwe, former Ugandan Vice-President, is a champion for Stamp Out Sleeping Sickness. She said:

"I don’t know of any programme in Uganda and many countries in Africa, which is actually linking universities with young people, who are the future of food security in every country; really going down to the ground to look at agriculture – a sector that has hither to been neglected...

So to me this is a new model which is going to get the policy makers hooked in, the researchers in the universities hooked in, the practitioners hooked in and the future for the economy hooked in through the young veterinarian – who will be going down to learn from communities but also bring new knowledge, that has been tested, so that the agricultural industry can move forward."