Japan pledges its contribution of USD 500,000 to IAEA’s off-cycle TC project ‘Strengthening Africa's Regional Capacity for the Diagnosis of Emerging or Re-emerging Zoonotic Diseases, Including Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), and Establishing Early Warning Systems’. This makes Japan’s total contribution to IAEA projects tackling EVD amount to USD 1.08 million.

On March 3, the Government of Japan pledged its contribution of USD 500,000 to support the IAEA’s project ‘Strengthening Africa's Regional Capacity for the Diagnosis of Emerging or Re-emerging Zoonotic Diseases, Including Ebola Virus Disease (EVD),and Establishing Early Warning Systems’, through Japan’s contribution to IAEA Peaceful Uses Initiative (PUI), following the approval of the project by the Board of Governors.


The project is aimed at developing capacity of the diagnosis of zoonotic diseases, including both human resource development and provision of equipment, and the strengthening of national and regional mechanisms for disease prevention and control, through networking, epidemiological surveillance and information exchange, for all African countries.


Together with previous contributions of 580,000 US dollars to the IAEA’s PUI project ‘Enhancing Capacity of National Monitoring Teams for Diagnosis of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) under High Bio-Safety Conditions’, Japan will have contributed a total of 1,080,000 US dollars to the IAEA’s activities in this area.


These two projects are expected to help African countries better tackle Ebola and other zoonotic diseases with short and medium term measures.
Ambassador Mitsuru Kitano stated “we highly value these two IAEA projects, as they will effectively complement with each other, in terms of range of focus and the targeted countries. We appreciate the efforts made by DDG Kwaku Aning and his staffs of the Secretariat in developing these projects’ at the Board of Governors meeting.