The German Government has made available a grant of €650,000 to boost the capacity of the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine (KCCR)
The support was announced by the German Embassy in Ghana, which said the grant is a rapid response measure to help fight the spread of COVID-19 in Ghana.
The Embassy said the amount is to help the centre modernize its facilities and buy consumables to enable to conduct more tests of suspected COVID-19 cases.
“As a rapid response measure to fight the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana, the German Government made available a 650.000 EUR grant to support the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine (KCCR) to modernize its technical facilities and to buy consumables and reagents for more testing of potential COVID-19 cases,” the Embassy stated in a Facebook post on Friday.
It also remarked that “the institute’s capacity to support a fast isolation of infected people will be further strengthened” as a result of the grant.
“KCCR has already been supported and advised by a seconded German virologist, Dr. Tabea Binger, since 2016,” the Embassy added.
KCCR is one of the two high-level research centres in Ghana leading efforts in the testing of suspected COVID-19 cases.
Based in the Ashanti Region, it serves largely the central and northern part of the country.
Between February and April 8, 2020, KCCR had tested about 1,600 samples of suspected COVID-19 cases
KCCR is a joint venture between the Ministry of Health (MoH), Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, and the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM), Hamburg, Germany. KCCR acts as an international platform for biomedical research in tropical medicine.
Source: Ghana/otecfmghana.com
