RIU Best Bet Stamp Out Sleeping Sickness set to have an impact on 10 million Ugandans
29 May 2010

Stamp Out Sleeping Sickness will help to protect over 10 million Ugandans from this deadly disease and will also help ensure their cattle are healthier and more productive. The success of the project and the lessons learned so far has resulted in £1 million of BBSRC funding to enable the approaches used in Uganda to be adapted for use in Nigeria. This should bring benefits in terms of healthier and more productive cattle to the owners of more than one million cattle in the Jos Plateau of Nigeria.

In addition to the work on Stamp Out Sleeping Sickness, RIU is also supporting a number of other programmes in East Africa:

• Africa Country Programmes in Tanzania and Rwanda, which should impact on over 1.5 million people.
• RIU Best Bets Resources for smallholder farmers; NERICA rice; Stopstriga; armyworm forecasting and control; and ShujaazFM - youth communication could together impact on some 25 million East Africans.

This gives RIU a total predicted impact figure for East Africa of more than 36 million people.

Ian Maudlin, Director of the RIU programme, commented:

"It is gratifying to see how lessons developed in Uganda are being adapted and applied to the needs and requirements of the Jos Plateau in Nigeria. RIU is building a series of credible models of how research can be put into use at scale. Furthermore we are showing that we can facilitate sharing of knowledge between sub-Saharan countries – the so called South-South exchange of knowledge."