First Good Financial Grant Practice (GFGP) Certification in Africa

Photo: George Omondi and Daudi Sallah (IPR), Lauren Thistlethwaite and Paula McCabe (LSTM) and Collins Waweru (IPR) at IPR offices.

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Written by the

‍The African Academy of Sciences

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First Good Financial Grant Practice (GFGP) Certification in Africa

Nairobi, Kenya (18 August 2020) - “We are proud to announce the first GFGP certification in Africa, another huge milestone for us and a great achievement for the Institute of Primate Research.” says Prof Tom Kariuki, the Director of Programmes at the African Academy of Sciences.

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) and PwC Kenya (GFGP certification body) supported the Kenyan- based Institute of Primate Research to be the first organization in Africa to be certified under the Good Financial Grant Practice (GFGP) international standard. This follows a recent announcement made by the Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) on the first organisation in the world to be certified (the Central Research Laboratory at Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences) based in Bangalore, India

The GFGP standard is the world’s first international standard in grant management, developed by the African Academy of Sciences’ Global Grant Community through extensive consultation with grantees from across Africa and with support from some of the world’s largest public and private sector funders.

"The GFGP certification on IPR-NMK’s financial and programme capacity is expected to bring increased visibility and potential additional funding to support IPR’s mission of improving human health through advances in basic/discovery and preclinical biomedical research to understand host-pathogen disease mechanisms - leading to development of new therapies, vaccines and diagnostics. IPR also focuses on biodiversity through non-human primate conservation. This standard will be used as part of our pre-award due diligence and it will act as a blueprint in improving our processes, policies and procedures for grant management capabilities. During the audit process we identified areas of weakness in the various functional departments and embarked on improvement strategies informed by the standard,” says Dr George Omondi, Head - Kenya Snakebite Research and Intervention Center, Institute of Primate Research.

Paula McCabe, Finance Faculty Manager at LSTM says, “We are delighted to have supported the Institute of Primate Research in Kenya with this amazing achievement. This is the 1st accreditation for an African organisation and should act as a springboard to future funding partnerships. The NIHR FAF funding, linked to the larger NIHR funded African Snakebite Research Group, was pivotal in helping to develop long-lasting financial management capacity building.”

Alex Nyaga, Director at PwC Kenya states that, “As a certifying body, our role is to determine whether an organisation follows the GFGP requirements before awarding them with a GFGP Certification. This involves conducting detailed checks on each of the clauses specified the GFGP standard.”

“The first two GFGP certified organizations signify our commitment to strengthen financial governance of organizations at a global scale. We hope that more organizations across Africa will be independently certified under the GFGP Standard and strengthen their financial governance,” says Prof Tom Kariuki, the Director of Programmes at the African Academy of Sciences.

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