A Kenyan innovator, Angus Nassir, was forced to take his ingenious Covid-19 testing gadget to Rwanda after he met a thick wall of bureaucracy at home in Kenya.
Speaking to the media, Nassir explained how bureaucracy drove his entire team to Rwanda where they are now thriving in their commitment to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.
"For one to conduct clinical trials, you need to get ethical approval. Ethical approval can be given by Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH), Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) or any of the universities that have been commissioned by the National Commission for Science and Technology and Innovation, unfortunately getting the approval proved impossible," he explained.
All his trips to KNH proved to be an exercise in futility as he was hit with tons of red tape.
At the public hospital, Nassir was informed that the ethical board had suspended its sittings for 3 months due to the pandemic.
His gadget had reportedly proved to be as accurate as the conventional testing kit, and would guarantee results in less than an hour.
The Kenyan national has now teamed up with 10 Rwandese scientists on the project that is now dubbed "RPA-Based Method for the Detection of Sars-Cov2".
Nassir's game-changing project was published on the Yale University-supported MedRx-journal.
Bureaucracy is a common feature in Kenya, especially in Government offices. These unnecessary forms of red tape grind along at a snail’s pace, to the extent of almost being self-serving.
They are the shackles that bind Kenya's economy which could be growing much faster and lifting many more of Kenya’s 45 million people out of poverty, as well equipping innovators such as Nassir with the tools not only have their products on the world market but combat Covid-19 as well.
