FORBES AFRICA 10th ANNIVERSARY: Towards The Next Decade

A. I’m still singing about the virtues of plants, and I keep on publishing many books to speak to the younger people and the general public… But beyond this, we have seen, for example, last year, when the president of Madagascar came and spoke about the benefits of artemisinin, which is an antiviral in the treatment of Covid. It’s only [recently] I’m seeing that the WHO is going back to the drawing board and saying that, ‘we need to go back to artemisinin’. I think, personally, this has been a year lost because we could have done, in parallel, research into traditional knowledge. China has done it so well. And in fact, we have started preparing many of the traditional Chinese medicines… Asia has had its fair share of pandemics, they have had SARS too, so there is a certain degree of preparedness. But in Africa, this is language we need to bring to the table: how much do we value our plant resources, how much do we value our traditional knowledge, and how do we translate this into products, which make sense to the people because at the end of the day, it’s an acceptable form of remedy, and in many countries is the only form of remedy.

So have we done enough? Are our universities doing enough? Is the private sector doing enough? What is the dialogue between the public and the private sectors to see that these kinds of recipes get translated into products? So this is an area where we link up agriculture to help. And we’re bringing it back to the gender component because at the end of the day, it’s the women who are the prime agriculturalists on the continent.