Kuwaiti fund for African Development opens call for nominations

15 Jan 2020, 12:00 am
Financial Nigeria

Summary

The $1 million Al-Sumait Prize rewards innovative and inspiring initiatives and research.

The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) has opened the process for application and submission of works for the 2020 edition of the Al-Sumait Prize for African Development. A statement released today by KFAS provides the area for the 2020 prize as well as the conditions and requirements for nominated candidates.

The $1 million Al-Sumait Prize is an initiative of His Highness Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, the Amir of Kuwait, and was launched in 2013 to honour late Dr. Abdulrahman Al-Sumait, a Kuwaiti physician who dedicated his life to helping less fortunate individuals and communities in Africa and addressing the challenges of development in the continent. The award is designed to reward innovative and inspiring initiatives and research by individuals and organisations that address the challenges facing the region.

The prize is administered annually in one of three fields of Food Security, Health and Education. According to KFAS, the area for the 2020 prize is Education. The prize will be awarded to individuals or institutions who, through their research projects or initiatives, have made significant advancement in improving people’s access to basic education, vocational and training programmes and/or higher education.

They must also demonstrate their roles in improving literacy among all members of society. Another area of impact includes decreasing the dependence of children’s education on the socio-economic status of their parents.

According to KFAS, which provides administrative and logistic support for the prize, submitted research works of nominated candidates should be composed of studies and applied research, published in peer reviewed journals and recognized at a global level. The research outcome must also have been applied after publication in African countries within the past ten years.

Nominations are to be accepted from institutions and scientific centres (universities, institutes and centres of scientific research), competent regional or international and United Nations organisations, former winners in the field of the prize, and former evaluation members. Self-nominations are not acceptable.

According to the statement, the Board of Trustees (BOT) for the Al-Sumait Prize oversees the prize. The BOT is chaired by H.E. Sheikh Sabah Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Its members include Bill Gates, Co-Chair of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Kwaku Aning, Former Deputy-Director General and Head of Department, International Atomic Energy Agency; and Adnan Shihab-Eldin, Director General of KFAS.

Other members are Makhtar Diop, World Bank’s Vice President for Infrastructure and Tareq Al-Mutawa, Executive Member of Board of Public Gathering Charity Committee; Stefania Giannini, Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO; and Daniel Gustafson, Deputy Director-General of Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

The laureates of the 2018 Al-Sumait Prize were Professor Salim Abdool Karim, Director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA); Professor Sheila West, Vice Chair for Research Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and the Rakai Health Sciences Program (RHSP), a non-profit independent research centre in Rakai, Uganda.

The nomination form can be obtained from AlSumaitPrize.org/nominations. KFAS said the submission process will close on June 30.


Related

Sustainable Development Section Sponsor

  • Access Bank Plc ...Financing the future
  • ... Sustainable Cities