Two Unilorin researchers win N7bn Innovate UK Award
Two researchers in the Department of Food Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, University of Ilorin, Professor J. O. Olaoye and Dr. M. O. Sunmonu, have won £141,959 (about N788, 862,483.27k) grant from Innovate UK for the 2022/2023 Africa AgriFood Knowledge Transfer Partnership (AAKTP).
The award was granted to the University of Ilorin in partnership with De Montfort University, UK and Microscale Embedded Limited, Abuja.
This was made known in a Grant Offer Letter dated November 30, 2022 and signed by the Deputy Director, Operations Delivery of Innovate UK, Barry Shaw.
Innovate UK is the funding agency for the AAKPT award grant. It is the United Kingdom’s national innovation agency that supports business-led innovation in all sectors, technologies, and UK regions.
The AAKPT grant will be used to train and coordinate farmers and to also work on building software for farmers that will enable them to access farm processes at a very convenient instance.
Speaking in Ilorin on Monday, Professor J. O. Olaoye, who is the Academic Lead for the project, said that “the grant award is Agricultural based. It is a Knowledge Transfer Partnership award called African Agriculture Knowledge Transfer Partnership (AAKTP)”.
In his words, “It is a joint award for three groups, De Montfort University, University of Ilorin, and Microscale Embedded Limited with the grant award of £141,959, to be shared among the three. The chunk of the money, £77,839, will be coming to the University of Ilorin because it has the highest responsibility and the De Montfort University will be having £64,120”.
He said that the three groups, through their representatives, had earlier put up a collective proposal with major work done by Dr. Sunmonu of the University of Ilorin as the Academic Supervisor.
“The lead supervisor is to create an enabling environment while the academic supervisor is the brain behind the project with the guidance of the lead supervisor. We must give kudos to Dr. Sunmonu for his resilience in this particular award. The company also has its chairman and the supervisor at the company level; the other University also has her own lead and academic supervisor”, he said.
According to Professor Olaoye, “This particular competition started in 2019/2020 when the results of 2021 were released and we were declared winner almost of the same amount but even higher but because of COVID we could not take it then. To the award company, they believed that it is our second award but to us it is the first because we could not assess the first one due to COVID.”
Source: tribuneonlineng.com
