The African Capacity
Building Foundation (ACBF) said it had spent about $28 million on capacity development programmes in public and private sectors and civil society organisations in Nigeria.
ACBF Executive Secretary, Prof. Emmanuel Nnadozie, who stated this during a press conference Forum in Abuja, noted that the amount was spent from 1991 to date.
He said the foundation, established in 1991 and based in Harare, Zimbabwe, had a mission of supporting capacity development in Africa in both public and private sectors and civil society organisations.
“Over the years ACBF has spent about half a billion dollars in about 20 years supporting capacity efforts across the whole continent in practically every country South of the Sahara stressing that in this process has been able to make a significant contribution.
“Let me give you the example of Nigeria where we are today.  Since the inception of the organisation the ACBF has spent well over $28 million helping to build capacity in Nigeria,” he said.
He said the typical example of what the organisation had done in Nigeria was the funding of the National Institute for Legislative studies (NILS).
According to him ACBF has just given another grant to NILS to continue to build capacity both at the national level and at the sub-regional in support of the ECOWAS parliament.
The grant is expected to benefit legislators and Nigerian National Assembly workers, the legislatures in the country’s 36 states and the parliament of the Economic Community of West African States.
While noting with concern that one of the challenges facing African countries was capacity building, in its pursuit of development, he said, ACBF had put in place structures to support capacity development in the continent.
He said the foundation had focused on building capacity that enabled individual to fulfil their potential and perform at their optimum level.
Nnadozie said ACBF also paid attention to capacity building that enabled institutions to anchor development agenda as well as capacity of organisations that enabled them to perform their roles effectively.
“ACBF tries to support capacity development in the areas of human capacity, institutional capacity and organisational capacity.
“The organisation does this in three ways, the first way the ACBF supports capacity development in the whole of Africa is by giving grants to capacity development projects. “The second one is to provide technical support either to the public sector, government agencies or regional organisations.
“The third is to provide knowledge on capacity development and ACBF has become a leader in knowledge and learning about capacity development in the continent,” he said.
He said ACBF was funded mainly by some multilateral development agencies and financial institution which included the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
He said no fewer than 38 African countries that are members also contributed yearly to the funding of ACBF.