By Ijeoma Olorunfemi
The Nigeria Natural Medicine Development Agency (NNMDA) on Thursday said the agency had gotten an approval to commence National Innovation Diploma courses on natural, traditional medicines’ research, products and development.
The Director-General of the agency, Dr Samuel Etatuvie, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), saying that the country is overdue in studying natural medicines.
Etatuvie said that the professional study of natural medicines and products development had the potential to increase the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country, if well harnessed.
“Knowledge is power and in natural medicine practice today, it has the potential to increase the GDP of Nigeria looking at the knowledge-based economy.
“Looking at some of our products, they came from ideas, research, sharing of experience and people that have used the products.
“With respect to the practice of natural medicine across the nation, we are looking at boosting our GDP because we have lots of natural medicine schools coming up.
“NNMDA has been given an approval to run Nigeria Natural Medicine College of Technology where we will be having Diploma programmes on natural medicines,’’ Etatuvie said.
According to him, the approval had already been given to the agency by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), adding that the programme would commence this year.
”The NBTE approved Natural Medicine Technology and Business Informatics in August 2022,”the D-G added.
Etatuvie further said that the college would serve as a platform where traditional medicine knowledge seekers would come for training professionally both for the product development and practice.
Etatuvie added that the knowledge-based economy aspect in natural medicine was a big market because, ”there is the existence of practitioners in tertiary institutions lecturing both locally and internationally.
“We are now exporting knowledge of natural medicine that we have here and it is a form of income to the country because there will be funds transfer.’’
The D-G further said that the agency was looking at integrating natural medicine knowledge into the country’s health care practice.
”Part of our mandate includes natural medicine practice integration into the country’s health care delivery system,”Etatuvie said.
He stated that the agency had developed 14 products while five had been listed by the National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC).
The NNMDA boss said: ”With some of our products, they will process them, convert them to capsules, tablets and syrups for easy consumption by patients.
“We are also working on the acceptability by the orthodox system, we are looking forward to seeing our products in community pharmacies, in hospitals being prescribed by health care practitioners.
“This is our own, nobody can do it for us, we are doing it for the country and we believe that the entire health care system will benefit from what NNMDA is doing,.’ (NAN)
