By Franklin Alli
Bank of Industry has approved the Projects Development Institute (PRODA) Enugu as one of the technology centres to fabricate and provide equipment to beneficiaries of its N5 billion Cottage Agro Processing Fund.
The institute was originally the Projects Development Agency under the defunct East Central State Government but later became a Research institute under the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) now Federal Ministry of Science and Technology, but still retains the acronym PRODA.
The Managing Director, BoI, Rasheed Olaoluwa, during a visit to the Institute in Enugu, disclosed that it was part of a deliberate plan and strategy to link centres of innovation with industry, as a similar visit had been paid to the Federal Institute of Industrial Research Oshodi, (FIIRO) Lagos.
“This is a journey. We have been to FIIRO and now at PRODA. I think you should watch out for more; Nigeria in the past had invested significantly in a lot of research institutes that have done a lot of work and we need to ensure that those works are commercialised and leveraged by the private sector to ensure that we fast-track Nigeria’s industrialisation.
And some of these technologies include the cassava processing equipment, corn flour equipment, the palm-kernel cracker and oil extractor among others,” he said.
Olaoluwa who was conducted round the facilities of the Institute by the Acting Director-General of PRODA, Dr. Charles Agulanna, said: “To my greatest surprise, I discovered this afternoon that PRODA just like FIIRO has also developed a number of technologies over the years and in addition to discussing in theory we actually went to the workshop and we looked at some of those technologies and we actually saw people coming here to take those technologies to set-up businesses in many parts of Nigeria.”
He noted that in addition to the agro-processing equipment production, PRODA also had other technologies such as equipment for producing pencils, which if actually commercialised, will make Nigeria the only country in Africa that produces pencils.
“We also discussed about the BoI’s Cottage Agro Processing (CAP) Fund which we launched recently. PRODA is also going to be one of the equipment suppliers to ensure that people who want to process Nigeria’s vast agricultural produce can come to PRODA and also adopt their technologies, to ensure that those products are processed to final food products or inter-mediate raw materials for industries,” he said.
In his response, Agulanna said: “This visit is a window for the Institute to start to impact positively on the economy of the country and we do have a lot of researched product on our shelves and we think with this coming of BoI, we will be well guided in trying to disseminate some of the technologies that we have here and some of the R&D products.”
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